This thesis explores the possibilities of embodied writing for social inquiry. Using an examination of the social production of bodily pain to exemplify my approach, and drawing upon autobiographical writing, I develop an embodied writing practice and theorize its implications for decolonizing knowledge production. Following a phenomenologically informed interpretive sociology, I attend closely to language and the construction of meaning through reflexive engagement with pain as a social phenomenon. I also utilize mindfulness meditative practice methodologically to centre the body within social research and intervene in the mind/body split which underwrites much Western knowledge production and reproduces normative, medicalized relations to bodily knowledge. I suggest that by undoing those traditional boundaries demarcating the possibilities of knowledge production, and attending to our epistemological locations which are themselves deeply political, we might generate differently imagined relations to embodiment.

Undergoing a self-study using the method of currere (Pinar, 1976), I examine my own learning as holistic, embodied, and relational in the context of my mother’s garden. Specifically, I explore my mother’s garden as a site of relational learning that intersects with various classrooms that feature in my educational experiences. The garden and the classroom intersect with/in one curricular landscape, where self and other engage in an embodied process fostering connections and knowledges about each other and place. In bringing forth my narrative through currere, I engage in reflective and reflexive praxis through journal writing, poetry, meditation, and photographic collage. Using these forms of expression, I reflect upon my experiential learning process, analyze issues and concepts related to the body-in-movement, as well as focus on community connections and ecology-based learning as pedagogical praxis.

This thesis explores the possibilities of embodied writing for social inquiry. Using an examination of the social production of bodily pain to exemplify my approach, and drawing upon autobiographical writing, I develop an embodied writing practice and theorize its implications for decolonizing knowledge production. Following a phenomenologically informed interpretive sociology, I attend closely to language and the construction of meaning through reflexive engagement with pain as a social phenomenon. I also utilize mindfulness meditative practice methodologically to centre the body within social research and intervene in the mind/body split which underwrites much Western knowledge production and reproduces normative, medicalized relations to bodily knowledge. I suggest that by undoing those traditional boundaries demarcating the possibilities of knowledge production, and attending to our epistemological locations which are themselves deeply political, we might generate differently imagined relations to embodiment.

Undergoing a self-study using the method of currere (Pinar, 1976), I examine my own learning as holistic, embodied, and relational in the context of my mother’s garden. Specifically, I explore my mother’s garden as a site of relational learning that intersects with various classrooms that feature in my educational experiences. The garden and the classroom intersect with/in one curricular landscape, where self and other engage in an embodied process fostering connections and knowledges about each other and place. In bringing forth my narrative through currere, I engage in reflective and reflexive praxis through journal writing, poetry, meditation, and photographic collage. Using these forms of expression, I reflect upon my experiential learning process, analyze issues and concepts related to the body-in-movement, as well as focus on community connections and ecology-based learning as pedagogical praxis.

The present study explored 12 womens experiences in five community-based improvisational movement sessions. The study was two-pronged in nature, attending to the experience of expressive movement and somatic awareness exercises as well as the experience of gathering together as women. Session activities were taken from movement and somatic practices such as Authentic Movement, the 5Rhythms®, YogaDance®, the Big Fat Ass Dance Class®, theatre-based exercises, contact improvisation and African Dance. The chosen methodology was hermeneutic phenomenology using a weekly sharing circle, post-session interviews, and journal entries as data. Although inquiring into both psychological and movement experiences, the study did not derive from a formal Dance/Movement Therapy perspective but instead, prioritized the womens own voices in order to elucidate the inherent experience and worth of expressive movement within a community framework. Three core constructs arose from my analysis: Conscious Embodiment, Conscious Play and Conscious Connection. The underlying role of relationality is highlighted in the final chapter. Findings contribute to a preventive and resiliency orientation as opposed to the more typical clinical and therapeutic research found in the field of Dance/Movement Therapy.

Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst drei empirische Beiträge, die der Frage nachgehen, ob und wie Helligkeit und Dunkelheit die Art und Weise verändern, wie Informationen wahrgenommen werden, Menschen interagieren oder Verhalten bewerten. Basierend auf Embodiment und Grounded Cognition-Ansätzen (Barsalou, 2008) wurde in drei Studienreihen der Einfluss von konzeptueller und perzeptueller Helligkeit bzw. Dunkelheit auf (1) die Informationsverarbeitung, (2) moralisches Urteilen und (3) Kooperation im sozialen Kontext untersucht. Die Ergebnisse demonstrieren die Bedeutsamkeit von Helligkeit und Dunkelheit im sozialen Kontext und bieten Implikationen im Verhandlungs- und Beratungskontext sowie moralischen Urteilens bei Gericht. In der ersten Studienreihe (Steidle, Werth, & Hanke, 2011) bestand das Ziel darin, die Wechselwirkung zwischen Dunkelheit, Abstraktionslevel und psychologischer Distanz zu untersuchen. Es wurde angenommen, dass die visuelle Wahrnehmung im Dunkeln weniger auf Details fokussiert ist, was zu mehr abstrakten Repräsentationen führen sollte. Basierend auf dem Grounded Cognition-Ansatz (Barsalou, 2008) wird argumentiert, dass sich die Beziehung zwischen physikalischer Dunkelheit und einem globalen perzeptuellen Verarbeitungsstil auf eine konzeptuelle Ebene überträgt. Drei Experimente demonstrierten, dass Dunkelheit im Vergleich zu Helligkeit einen globaleren perzeptuellen und konzeptuellen Verarbeitungsstil hervorrief, unabhängig davon, ob Dunkelheit geprimt oder physikalisch manipuliert wurde. Zusätzlich zeigten zwei IATs, dass Dunkelheit mit einem hohen Abstraktionslevel assoziiert ist. Des Weiteren wurde angenommen, dass Dunkelheit ebenso mit der Wahrnehmung psychologischer Distanz in Beziehung steht. Es wurde argumentiert, dass der Mangel an konkreten Informationen einerseits und die abstrakten Repräsentationen andererseits dazu führen, dass Personen und Objekte im Dunkeln nicht als Teil der unmittelbaren Erfahrung erlebt werden. Acht IATs belegten die implizite Beziehung zwischen Dunkelheit und den Distanzdimensionen: räumliche, zeitliche, hypothetische und soziale Distanz. Abschließend wurden Implikationen auf soziale Prozesse wie Vorurteile und Kooperation diskutiert. In der zweiten Studienreihe (Hanke, Steidle, & Werth, 2012) wurde der Frage nachgegangen, ob und wie Helligkeit und Dunkelheit moralische Kognitionen und Urteile verändern. Helligkeit kann als ein Zeichen moralischer Reinheit verstanden werden, die verteidigt wird, um das eigene Ansehen aufrechtzuerhalten. Dunkelheit dagegen als ein Zeichen von Unmoral und Verschwiegenheit, die eine Möglichkeit bietet, durch andere unbeobachtet zu sein. Basierend auf diesen metaphorischen Bedeutungen wurde argumentiert, dass Helligkeit im Vergleich zu Dunkelheit Prozesse aktiviert, das eigene Ansehen aufrechtzuerhalten – hier in Form einer erhöhten Normorientierung und stärkeren Verurteilens unmoralischem Handeln. In Studie 1 wurde zunächst gezeigt, dass Helligkeit verglichen mit Dunkelheit die Verfügbarkeit persönlicher Werte und Normen steigerte. Dementsprechend wurde angenommen, dass Personen, bei denen das Konzept Helligkeit aktiviert wird, unmoralische Handlungen stärker verurteilen, mehr negative moralische Emotionen zeigen und eher an moralischen Verhaltensabsichten festhalten sollten als Personen, bei denen das Konzept Dunkelheit aktiviert wird. Studie 2 belegte diese Annahme und demonstrierte den zu Grunde liegenden Prozess: die Orientierung an moralischen Normen. Ob unmoralische Handlungen als schlechte Absichten der handelnden Person gesehen werden oder durch äußere Umstände entschuldigt werden, hängt in hohem Maße von der sozialen Nähe zur handelnden Person ab (Studie 2A und 2B). Diese Ergebnisse tragen zum Verständnis des Embodiment moralischer Kognitionen bei und bieten praktische Implikationen für moralische Urteile bei Gericht. In der dritten Studienreihe (Hanke, Steidle, & Werth, 2012) wurde der Effekt von Dunkelheit auf Kooperation im sozialen Kontext aus der Perspektive sozialer Distanz untersucht. Es wurde argumentiert, dass Dunkelheit als ein Zeichen für soziale Distanz kompensatorisches Verhalten in Form von Kooperation auslösen kann, um die Distanz zum Interaktionspartner zu reduzieren. Fünf Studien belegten die Annahme, dass Dunkelheit unabhängig davon, ob Dunkelheit konzeptuell aktiviert oder physikalisch manipuliert wurde, Kooperation steigerte. Dieser Zusammenhang wurde durch das Gefühl von sozialer Nähe mediiert. Darüber hinaus wurden dispositionale und situationale Moderatoren der Beziehung zwischen Dunkelheit und Kooperation untersucht. Die Ergebnisse belegten, dass Dunkelheit Kooperation nur dann verstärkte, (1) wenn Kooperation half, das Bedürfnis nach Zugehörigkeit befriedigen zu können und (2) wenn Personen empfänglich für Umgebungsreize waren, die ein Bedürfnis nach sozialer Nähe auslösen konnten. Die wichtigste Implikation dieser Ergebnisse ist, dass Dunkelheit nicht in jeder Situation funktional ist, sondern nur dann, wenn soziale Distanz überwunden und soziale Nähe erreicht werden kann. In den folgenden Abschnitten wird zunächst auf die theoretische Grundlage dieser Arbeit eingegangen. Darauf aufbauend folgen ein kurzer Überblick der wichtigsten Erkenntnisse und die Vorstellung des Arbeitsmodells. Abschließend werden die theoretischen und praktischen Implikationen der vorliegenden Befunde diskutiert.

Abstract In this thesis, I attempt to examine Jamaica Kincaid¡¦s re-negotiation with the politics of power relations in her novels. Kncaid¡¦s novels, through the strategic deployment of autobiographical writing, redress the power dimension in the notions of self and history. The fact that Kincaid frames the field of power relations within the thematic recurrence of mother-daughter relations structures her novels in a way that conflates her personal stories with her group history. Moreover, such a structure emphatically registers the self-positioning act of Kincaid¡¦s writing as a strategy for survival. The first chapter explores how Kincaid mobilizes her self-writing as an act of political resistance. On the one hand, Kincaid opposes her writing which is delivered in the name of herself or her culture to the poststructuralist pronouncements of the general demise of a writing subject. On the other hand, Kincaid, through implicating the poststructuralist fracture of self in the protocol of decolonization, attempts to strategically inhabit in what Homi Bhabha calls the in-between space to define herself. The second chapter deals with the inscription of historical forces on the body. Foucault¡¦s genealogical unpacking of history in the body here helps to investigate how Kincaid¡¦s fictional alter egos bear and, more importantly, act out against the inscription of power. The third chapter focuses on the politics of Kincaid¡¦s autobiographical writing. At first, I unpack the relations between history and the politics of women¡¦s writing in the West Indies, and borrow the poststructuralist interrogation of Western historical knowledge to contradict the West¡¦s epistemological claims to West Indian history. And then I turn to the analysis of Kincaid¡¦s autobiographical writing, which, through its thematic deployment of mother-daughter relations, turns on the political empowerment in her strategic integration of her personal and collective history.

This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which late medieval English drama produces and theorises emotions, in order to engage with the complex nexus of ideas about the links between sensation, emotion, and cognition in contemporary philosophical and theologial thought. It contributes to broader considerations of the cultural work that religious drama performed in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England in the context of the ongoing debates concerning its theological and social relevance. Drawing on recent research in the cognitive sciences and the history of emotion, this thesis conceives of dramatic performances as passionate encounters between actors and audiences – encounters which do not only re-create biblical history as a sensual reality, but in which emotion becomes attached to signs and bodies through theatrical means. It suggests that the attention paid to the processes through which audiences become emotionally invested in a play challenges assumptions about biblical drama of the English towns as a negligible contribution to philosophical and theological thinking in the vernacular. The analysis is conducted against the background of medieval and modern conceptions of emotions as ethically and morally relevant phenomena at the intersection between body and reason, which is outlined in chapter one. Each of the four main chapters presents a detailed examination of a series of pageants or plays drawn mainly from the Chester and York cycles and the Towneley and N-Town collections. These are supplemented, on occasion, with analysis of individual plays from fragmentary cycles and collections. The examinations undertaken are placed against the devotional and intellectual backdrop of late medieval England, in order to demonstrate how dramatic performances of biblical subject matter engage with some of the central issues in the wider debate about the human body, soul, and intellect. The second chapter focuses on the creation of living images on the stage, and specifically on didactically relevant stage images, in the Towneley Processus Prophetarum, the Chester Moses and the Law, and the N-Town Moses. The third chapter shifts the focus to the performance of the Passion in the N-Town second Passion play and the York Crucifixio Christi, concentrating on the potential effects of the perception of physical violence on audience response. The subject of chapter four is the emotional behaviours and expressions accorded to the Virgin Mary in the Towneley and N-Town Crucifixion scenes, and those of her precursors, the mothers of the innocents, in the Digby and Coventry plays of the Massacre of the Inncocents. In chapter five, the analysis finally turns to dramatisations of the Resurrection, examining its realisation on stage in the Chester Skinners’ play, as well as staged responses to the event by the apostles and the Marys in the N-Town The Announcement to the Three Marys; Peter and John at the Sepulchre and the Towneley Thomas of India. These four central chapters pave the way for a summary, in the conclusion, of the central problematic underpinning this thesis: how the evocation of emotion in an audience is linked to embodiment in theatrical performance, and tied to a certain awareness, on the part of playwrights, of the popular biblical drama’s potential as a locus of philosophical-theological debate.

Increasingly since the 1990s those of us who are interested in gender issues in education have heard the question: What about the boys? A discourse has emerged in New Zealand, as in other countries including Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, that attention spent on addressing issues related to the educational needs of girls has resulted in the neglect of boys and problems related to their schooling. Positioned within this discourse, boys are depicted as disadvantaged, victims of feminism, underachieving or failing within the alienating feminised schooling environment and their struggles at school are seen as a symptom of a wider ‘crisis of masculinity'. This anxiety about boys has generated much debate and a number of explanations for the school performance of boys. One concern, that has remained largely unexamined in the Aotearoa New Zealand context, is that the dominant discourse of masculinity is characterised by a restless physicality, anti-intellectualism, misbehaviour and opposition to authority all of which are construed as antithetical to success at school. This thesis explores how masculinities are played out in the schooling experiences of a small group of 5, 6 and 7 year old boys in two New Zealand primary schools as they construct, embody and enact their gendered subjectivities both as boys and as pupils. This study of how the lived realities of schooling for these boys are discursively constituted is informed by feminist poststructuralism, aspects of queer theory and, in particular, draws on the works of Michel Foucault. The research design involved employing an innovative mix of data generating strategies. The discursive analysis of the data generated in focus group discussions, classroom and playground observations, children’s drawings and video and audio recording of the normal classroom literacy programmes is initially organised around these sites of learning in order to explore how gender is produced discursively, embodied and enacted as children go about their work and their play. The research shows that although considerable diversity was apparent as the boys fashioned their masculinities in these different sites, ‘doing boy’ is not inimical to ‘doing schoolboy’ as all the boys, when required to, were able to constitute themselves as ‘intelligible’ pupils (Youdell, 2006). The research findings challenge the notion of school as a feminised and alienating environment for them. In particular, instances of some of the boys disrupting the established classroom norms, as recorded by feminist researchers more than two decades ago, are documented. Concerns then, that “classroom practices reinforced a notion of male importance and superiority while diminishing the interests and status of girls” (Allen, 2009, p. 124) appear to still be relevant, and the postfeminist discourse “that gender equity has now been achieved for girls and women in education” (Ringrose, 2013, p. 1) is called into question. Amid the greater emphasis on measuring easily quantifiable aspects of pupils’ educational achievement, what this analysis does is to recognize the processes of schooling as highly complex and to offer a more nuanced response to the question of boys and their schooling than that offered by, for example, men’s rights advocates. It suggests that if we are committed to improving education for all children, the question needs to be re/framed so as not to lose sight of educational issues related to girls and needs to ask just which particular groups of boys and which particular groups of girls are currently being disadvantaged in our schools.

Adolescence is marked with significant changes in how girls feel and act within their bodies, and is considered a special risk period for body image disruptions. Cross sectional quantitative research within this area suggests that parents represent an important contextual and developmental contributor to body image. The present study aimed to address gaps in previous research by investigating parental influences, including both protective and risk factors, on girls’ embodied experiences through utilizing a prospective qualitative design with a diverse sample of twelve girls, ages 9-18, interviewed annually over four years. Results revealed the presence of both protective and risk factors related to embodiment experiences within the parental relationships, including aspects of relational qualities, self-care, evaluative gaze and social location. Results are discussed in relation to Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and to previous research. The implications for future research are also discussed.