This study explore how different forms of embodied experiences in virtual reality can be explained. Virtual reality (VR) is a quickly emerging, although understudied field that in the last decade have come to take a bigger and bigger part in everyone’s daily life. With the rise of virtual reality new possibilities for social platforms in VR have emerged, one of these is the virtual world of VRChat. This paper aims to give an introduction to the world of VRChat, through looking at how different embodied practises take place in it. It is based on a two-month long ethnographic fieldwork in the world of VRChat, following at a group of around 20 individuals scattered around the world and their experiences of embodiment in VRChat. This paper looks at how different forms of embodiment take place in VRChat and how these forms of embodiment affect different aspects of being in a virtual world. I study how mirrors and avatars through embodiment and interplay of different agencies create identity and a sense of ‘me’ amongst users in VRChat. I look at how embodiment connects to immersion and how it bridges the gap between reality and virtuality, through the translation of the sense touch in virtual reality to real life a. I see that a non-traditional form of immersion plays a big role in creating this phenomenon which is called phantom sense

This is a study on embodied rhythm and how it can be formulated and made into concepts. The study also focuses on how didactic resources are used in relation to embodied rhythm in jazz dance teaching. The work with this study took its starting point in the strong physical experience of dancing jazz dance and the problems in being able to talk about the rhythmical aspects of that experience in didactic contexts. Through studies of rhythm within many different fields a base of knowledge was created. Some examples of the different fields are music theory, cultural history, psychology, didactics, socio cultural theories as well as in dance theory. The knowledge base was used to develop concept that relates to embodied rhythm and didactic resources used in relation to that. The concepts were applied in observations of jazz dance classes and the usefulness and relevance of the concepts were tested. The study presents the concepts as a tool for discussions on embodied rhythm, for working with rhythm as part of dance teaching, for development of dance didactics and as a way to make the strong physical and rhythmical experience of dancing jazz a bit easier to address verbally.

Refugee Resettlement Agencies in the United States make headlines because of the people they help, but what about the immigrant support providers doing the work? In Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts there are organizations that open their doors to newly arrived people needing assistance. The purpose of this case study was to explore the experience of working as a resettlement provider for immigrants in Massachusetts between 2016 and 2021. I argue that Donald Trump’s policy decisions were a form of structural violence against and experienced by the resettlement organizations contracted to the federal government to assist refugees. Preliminary literature reviews showed research on refugees was saturated. A few articles discussed psychological impacts on providers in a clinical setting or presented quantitative analyses of immigration statistics. My research is a novel ethnographic case study of the resettlement organizations. This study was conducted over three years during the COVID-19 pandemic. I examined the effect of changes to the body-politic, the social-body, and the body-self levels of experience. By using a holistic model of health, I connect these experiences to the physical, social, and psychological dimensions of wellbeing. Throughout the fourth chapter, I argue that Trump’s pernicious executive policy decisions were intentional acts of violent against resettlement organizations across the United States. The anti-immigrant rhetoric in the media and policies, combined with increased xenophobia withdrew vital physical and social resources for providers. This created a shift in the hegemonic forces in the United States that impacted organization and refugees alike. Chapter Five argues that Massachusetts resettlement organizations were impacted through implicit effects at the state and community levels. As the pressure of their work increased and their community relationship became more complicated, their precarity was compounded by COVID-19. This is illustrated through the starvation of the social-body and subsequent re-feeding they experienced. Finally, Chapter Six argues that individual resettlement providers experienced a state of precarious wellbeing. They had to develop creative coping mechanisms to work through the precarity after being flooded with new arrivals. The providers embodied this precarity on a personal level, though not passively. They pushed back against the Trump Administration’s violence through interagency legal action, solid community partnerships, and individual coping mechanisms.

Having begun from the assumption that our most fundamental way to relate to the world stems from an #I think# and that consciousness is at the center of this act, Edmund Husserl sets himself up for a very narrow and specialized view of human experience. In the end, such assumptions in the philosophical tradition and their terms often remain unquestioned and ingrained in a paradigm of discourse. My aim is to move beneath these assumptions-using Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological work-so as to, first, explicitly undermine the scope of Husserlian intentionality at its foundation and, second, decenter the subject in contemporary phenomenological literature. An account of human experience in terms of inner intentional content, I argue, yields an incomplete and misleading picture of our human involvements and we must ultimately move beyond the subject and its logic. The way we are always already being-in-the-world and embodied in the phenomenal texture of everydayness leaves the cogito one step behind.

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