This project focuses on persistent gaps in philosophies of the body: the enduring mindbody divide in accounts of phenomenology, the unfulfilled promises of representing and inhabiting the body in online and virtual spaces, and the difference between health as quantified in medical discourse versus health as lived experience. These tensions are brought to light through the electronic food journal genre where the difficulty in capturing pre-noetic, outsideconsciousness aspects of experience and embodied health are thrown into relief against circulating cultural discourses surrounding health, body size, self-surveillance, and self-care. The electronic food journal genre serves as a space for users to situate themselves and their daily practices in relation to medicalization, public policy, and the conflation of health and body size. These journals form artifacts reflecting life writing practices in digital spaces that model compliant self-surveillance as well as transgressive self-care. The journals instantiate the mind-body-technology interactivity of extended cognition, but also point toward a rupture in the feedback loops that promise to integrate pre-noetic aspects of being and experience. By exploring the tensions inherent in these online food journaling spaces, this project concludes by offering a PEERS heuristic/heuretic for assessing theories and technologies of embodiment and health for their ability to access what resides in the "remainder" of current embodiment philosophy and to identify the aspects of lived experience left unattended in USDA health policy, food journaling interfaces, and embodiment philosophy. The PEERS model can be used to evaluate existing technologies for their capacity to map true mind-body-technology interactivity and to build new theory that accounts for a fuller, more nuanced approach to understanding embodied reality and embodied health.

Nineteenth-century state mental hospitals across New England and the United States are linked today with images of confinement, forced treatment, torture, abandonment, and family separation. This project does not directly challenge those associations. An ethnographic study in medical anthropology, this study is based on three years of fieldwork observations and qualitative interviews with neighbors, townspeople, former employees, and visitors to the open campus of a decommissioned state mental hospital in Massachusetts. Excavated from that hospital’s annual reports dating back to 1896 and gathered from local memories and storytelling, this projects considers the central place that work once held in the lives of psychiatric patients at Medfield State Hospital and the place that idleness holds for patients living within today’s institution of community care. Participants’ memories track the shifting perceptions and meanings of mental illness that resulted once “industrial therapy” programs were ended in state mental hospitals. This inquiry describes the ways that the loss of work changed psychiatric patients’ experiences of suffering, promoting the use of new chemical treatments, accelerating deinstitutionalization, and catalyzing new patterns nationally of service utilization and psychiatric disability. From participants’ memories and the author’s reflections on clinical practice as an independently licensed social worker (LICSW) in Massachusetts, this analysis uncovers the social functions of staying sick within contexts of unequal opportunity and joblessness. This study reveals the complicated and punishing work of surviving and helping people survive across de-industrialized landscapes as mental health practitioners assist the disenfranchised by recasting social suffering into psychiatric illness with treatment-induced embodiments that simultaneously help to manage poverty and perpetuate risk within disabilized citizens.

This thesis explores the intricate interplay of fatness and queerness, as navigated by Greek individuals. Employing a qualitative approach and thematic analysis, the study aims to unfold the experiences, challenges, and resilience. To do so it is informed by queer theory, as well as Michel Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. Ethical considerations, the application of queer phenomenology, and an awareness of positionality guide the study to ensure a compassionate and empathetic examination of these experiences. The findings reveal the pervasive societal narratives on fatness and queerness and the significant role of self-identification, aiming to contribute to the broader discourse on body image, self-identity, and societal expectations.

Embedded in debates concerning Britishness and citizenship, this thesis considers the influence of the dualistic tradition on citizenship theory and highlights the exclusionary nature of citizenship as founded in this paradigm. Working within this dualistic paradigm means that the lives and practices of being a citizen are not captured, creating an exclusionary cycle whereby the concept excludes the lives of many citizens, and many individuals are excluded from being a citizen as defined by the concept. This thesis used participatory, visual and online methods to explore belonging and exclusion with young people around England. Informed strongly by the field research, this thesis analyses citizenship as defined through dualistic and embodied paradigms and considers the potential of an embodied concept of citizenship for engaging young people.

In this dissertation, I argue that modern understandings of both technology and gendered selfhood were mutually fashioned across the long eighteenth century. This argument makes a number of interventions in current scholarly narratives by contending, first, that interiorized subjectivity was conceptualized in the eighteenth century as constructed from (and perceptible through) a series of technological objects; second, that as gender difference was increasingly inscribed on bodies thought to be characterized by intrinsic biological variance, the importance of technological supplements to defining bodily capacities meant that this variance was often realized through artificial objects; and third, that the mechanization of the British textile manufacture, which has been identified as the industrial revolution’s catalyst, was premised not on machines’ inherent efficacy, but on the identification of technological ingenuity with a new kind of British masculinity, and a concurrent devaluation of supposedly primitive Indian and British female labourers. In my first chapter, I explore the relationship between optical technologies and stage machinery through a reading of Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon, arguing that Behn’s play enacts a radical revision of technological empiricism by privileging experiences of feminized spectacular materiality as sites of knowledge. My second chapter traces the afterlife of Restoration mechanical philosophy in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and explores how Clarissa’s interiority is conceptualized by both Lovelace and Richardson as fundamentally technological. In my third chapter I turn to John Cleland’s pornographic Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, showing how the text’s representations of the technologies of textual production are intimately linked with its eroticism and violence. In my final chapter, I analyse a collection of political pamphlets and popular treatises to show how the industrialization of the British cotton manufacture erected a technological nationalism through the mechanical appropriation of women’s labour. By attending to the material, textual, and conceptual operations of eighteenth-century technologies through readings of a wide range of literary and popular works, this project ultimately demonstrates how the boundaries of modern gender difference were constructed along with and out of the body’s most artificial parts. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

My dissertation contributes to the material and sensorial interest in the humanities by focusing on the beholder’s phenomenological experience of multi-panel paintings by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), Rembrandt’s first and most financially successful pupil. Dou has long been hailed as the founder of the Leiden fijnschilders (fine painters), who brought mimesis to the height of artistic achievement around mid-century. Archival documents reveal that at least eight of Dou’s paintings were once fitted within cases that featured highly illusionistic still life paintings on the outer surfaces of their hinged doors or sliding lids. While only two of the recorded covers survive, they feature both common and luxury objects with varied surface textures and lighting effects that exhibit a level of artifice true to the goal of painting professed by Philips Angel: schijn zonder sijn (“semblance without being”). Projecting out of the darkness of false shallow niches, the objects addressed the viewer in a trompe l’oeil mode and with a startling mimetic force that invited closer scrutiny. Yet, Dou’s still life works are rarely the subject of critical analysis and remain on the periphery of seventeenth-century Dutch art historical scholarship, overshadowed by his novel achievements in genre painting. Scholars most often interpret Dou’s still lifes as protective mechanisms for and allegorical glosses on the paintings they concealed. Instead, I argue that these approaches have limited our understanding of their significance. The disassembly and loss of most of these painted covers has further obscured their functions and meanings. My phenomenological approach underscores the ways in which these painted still life covers fostered an embodied relationship with the beholder in the context of the art collections for which they were destined. In Chapter 1, I gather evidence of Dou’s extant and lost still life covers and quantify this practice and consider these paintings together as an understudied corpus in concert with the paintings they covered. In Chapter 2 and 3, I provide historical and theoretical contexts for Dou’s nested paintings to ground them in pictorial and material traditions of concealment and revelation that permeated early modern culture (Netherlandish, German, and Italian) from the fourteenth- to the late seventeenth century. I consider them modern adaptations of the illusionistic images on the exterior of devotional diptychs and triptychs, insisting on their presence in the liminal space that connects the painted and real world. In Chapter 4, I analyze Dou’s painted still life covers as “meta-paintings,” characterizing them as theoretical objects charged with their own agency and the ability to invite the beholder to “think” with both their mind and body. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which Dou’s still life covers and René Descartes’s natural philosophy exhibit a shared and contemporaneous distrust of the senses through an epistemology of doubt and deceit, a premise that expanded the horizons of their respective fields in the seventeenth century. / 2025-09-21T00:00:00Z

Cities are co-constructed places shaped by interlocking systems of oppression. The cultural practices, socioeconomic systems, and bodily experiences born out of oppressive systems impact not only how cities are designed, but how people interact with the space. This dissertation examines how embodied experiences (habits, narratives, behaviors) of neighborhood change in Buffalo, New York affect residents’ sense of belonging. Drawing from scholarship on embodiment and place attachment this study examines how the urban form and personal identities inform a person’s sense of belonging. Participants (n=6) were asked to participate in five phases: 1) a life history interview; 2) a semi-structured interview; 3) the collection of audio-visual materials, and 4) a walking tour. Findings suggest embodied experiences of neighborhood change inform participants sense of belonging. Race and gender resulted in differing interactions with people and place. This study adds to existing literature on belonging by offering an understanding into how white residents experience neighborhood change, which is rarely attended to in the literature. This study has the potential to inform future interdisciplinary research as well as municipal efforts to engage residents in community development and urban policy design. / 2025-05-15T00:00:00Z

This research project is about the lived experiences of upper secondary school and adult education teachers from a remote region of Sweden, during the global pandemic of 2020 – 2021. Educational change can be understood in terms of experiences, through listening to teachers’ voices, which have the capacity to bring new knowledge for future usage of digital platforms in education. Teaching is an embodied experience and opportunities for movement have become limited in the virtual learning environment. A radical change in the methods of communication has also occured, in particular the verbal and non-verbal clues of oral interaction, which differ in physical and virtual classrooms. Interpersonal relationships have been shown to be of the utmost importance for successful learning, and these need to be formed and maintained both online and offline. Some students are at risk of falling behind academically and socially due to remote learning. The research has shed light on this situation and illustrates how governments should work effectively with teachers to ensure that all students can succeed, regardless of individual setbacks experienced during the global pandemic. This is an ethical responsibility of importance to ensure that no student will be disadvantaged as a result of remote learning.

This thesis investigates possibilities for developing an archiving praxis to help Black trans people live. Inspired by recent Black trans thinking and creativity, the research here centres conversations with five Experts working in a range of academic, artistic, and activist archiving practices. The analysis of these conversations focuses on three areas which guide the investigative chapters, motivations for working with archives, encounters with archives and possibilities for developing a praxis to help us live. The need for this work is shaped by the specificity of blackness and transness in the racial capitalism of the West, the writing is framed by the specificity of producing work at and for Uppsala University whose archives house state records of eugenics and racial science.  Looking to how archives shape bodies and how bodies shape archives, the methodologies guiding this work give space for the writing of this thesis to become an archival experiment. Considering and attending to powers of affect and care shapes this thesis as an embodied exploration, a practice manifesting in the work to further inform the praxis that the thesis investigates. Voices from Black feminist thought, Black cultural theory, queer of colour critique and Black trans cultural production and/as knowledge guide this analysis and offer points of reflection for the conversations with the Experts and my own experiences unfolding in the archive.  The thesis evidences possibilities for developing an archiving praxis to help Black trans people live. The analysis also points to capacious and expansive temporalities for this archival praxis. The thesis concludes that there is a need for more time, more voices and more listening to develop this praxis and further explore possibilities that open up with questioning temporalities. Perhaps that work starts in the space where the conclusion of this thesis, this archive, arrives; starts with asking when does the archive happen.

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