Yes / Current dominant trends in the biological and psychological sciences tend to put emphasis on the role of the brain, cognition, and consciousness in realising emotional states and attempting to regulate them. In this article, I suggest an alternative approach with the idea that emotions emerge within social relations and give meaning and value to the situations in which we are located. Humans are understood as embodied emotional selves for who thought and emotion are intertwined. However, individuals can get caught in obsessive and compulsive thinking and feeling traps where the self loses touch with its emotions, and because of this also loses contact with the social situation and the ability to skilfully navigate it. In such circumstances, the self gets overwhelmed by emotion and loses its poise in the social setting. I consider Buddhist meditation as a technique through which people can develop a more reflexive emotional self, where reflexivity is not about control of emotion but owning one's feelings and being able to respond more sensitively and skilfully in various situations.

No description available.

This is a systemic practice doctorate where research is undertaken through a social and relational constructionist lens (McNamee and Hosking, 2012) under a broader umbrella of systemic qualitative research practice. A philosophical orientation to inquiry is taken, offering a way of exploring encounters, and specifically conversations in practice, in an embodied relational and dialogical way from within the experience. This locates me as an active participant alongside other active participants, and self- and relational reflexivity feature centrally within a systemic approach to practice and inquiry. The specific inquiry focus is on embodied, reflexive processes as I engage with others in everyday conversations on issues that matter to different professional and non-professional individuals and community groups; it is a complex ecology. Systemic, embodied, relational concepts are explored through a lens that sees inquiry as philosophically informed. This acknowledges the professional, personal and multiple contexts that inform both the doing and being in each conversation within practice and inquiry. The multi-versa of individuals and groups, professional and non-professional are examined through attention to moments of conversation portrayed through vignettes and dialogical excerpts. I try to capture a sense of the living dynamic of each of the interactions through attention to my multi-vocal inner dialogue and the multiplicity of felt experiences within these conversations where I am moved, stirred, unsettled and fully embodied: I become the case study in the ebbs and flows of this experience. How I inform these processes, and how I am informed by the responses of others, comes under close scrutiny. Attention is given to reciprocal responses, my internal dialogue, as I respond to what has gone before, external moves within these relational unfolding conversational encounters, how the conversation is experienced by those involved, and how we move on together. This inquiry focuses on embodied relational processes within the multiple complex dynamic of these conversations, unpacking our ways of ‘going on’ together (Wittgenstein, 1953). Autoethnography (Finlay, 2002; Ellis, 2004; Etherington, 2004), self- and relational reflexivity (1992), Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) (Pearce, 1994), and the process of writing itself are some of the concepts employed to enter this complexity. The unique additional inquiry tool introduced, alongside these, is the personal metaphor of rock climbing. This is chosen because of the fit I consider it has within a conceptual frame of relational embodiment, emphasising the ‘I’, a systemic practitioner and climber, as an embodied being with other embodied beings in conversation. I enter this process of inquiry with openness to enable change and to be changed, and I hope to challenge some established ideas about research. I consider the extent to which the metaphor illuminates embodied, self- and relationally reflexive processes in the context of systemic inquiry. The usefulness and application of this metaphor is tested as an embodied reflexive tool. I explore whether ways of thinking about and understanding embodied relational and dynamic processes can be extended. New features that come to light in the process of this inquiry are explored and the insights that may emerge, along with possible contributions to systemic inquiry and practice, are considered. The wider use of metaphors emerging through the dialogue that people offer to describe experience and to capture a sense of lived moments opens further potential for new learning. The reflexive scope and use of metaphor generally is discussed at the end, along with personal and professional learning from the process of writing and inquiry. I propose a new lens to reflexive inquiry that is suited to systemic practice, embodied reflexive inquiry in which I draw attention to embodied reflexive detailed features within interactions between people. This has wide-ranging applications in systemic and other contexts, including community settings, systemic therapy, training and supervision and across different professional networks, and is explored here. My hope is that this inquiry will to add to the growing field of systemic inquiry texts.

This dissertation interrogates the nature of composers as aesthetic agents re-orienting from the socio-cultural contexts of the Weimar Republic (1919-1932) to those of the Third Reich in Germany (1933-1945). Work in the sociology of culture, sociology of arts and sociology of music has focused on cultural consumption, including music, as bound up in the reflexive projects by individuals and groups to constitute and reconstitute their social reality. Within my research I focus on the creation of cultural artefacts, in this case ‘works’ in the Western art music tradition, as central to processes of aesthetic agency where composers are engaged in reflexive projects of constituting and reconstituting their social reality and acting within those constructs. To begin the opening historical chaper, ‘Mortification of Modernism’, uses Goffman’s work in Asylums (1968) to contextualize the cultural policies and activities of the Weimar Republic, considered the classical era of modernism, as a home world from which those involved in modernist ventures developed presenting cultures supported by bespoke institutions established in the early post WWI years. During the waning years of the Republic and the rise of National Socialism, these support structures, including the individuals that made up the cooperative networks of modernism, were destroyed removing most connections to the Weimar Republic modernist home world. In the first years of the Third Reich through numerous denunciations, dismissals, policies, etc. the presenting culture of Weimar modernists was mortified through abasements, degradations and humiliations. Having identified – through qualitative mapping of concert programmes, music reviews and festival participation – composers involved in modernist circles in the Weimar Republic, their career paths and compositional outputs were traced throughout the years of the Third Reich to interrogate the aesthetic agency of composers in light of significant situational and perspectival incongruity. The dissertation then considers each of five composers in depth in separate chapters – Paul Hindemith, Rudolf Wagner-Regeny, Ernst Pepping, Heinrich Kaminski and Wolfgang Fortner. The five were selected based on four criteria: a high degree of activity in Weimar modernist circles (festivals, concerts, societies); continued presence in Germany for a significant portion of the Third Reich; continued professional activity as composers during the Third Reich; access to relevant source material both secondary (biographies, reviews, stylistic analyses, etc.) and primary (scores, letters, diaries, authored texts, etc.) from the subjects. The data illumines complex repertoires of adaptive strategies these individuals engaged in – with, through and to musical products – and how music is not only shaped by wider socio-cultural contexts, but how its construction is a primary resource for agents to respond to and structure the socio-cultural contexts around them. Key findings include the constitution of music as resource for showing both complicity with and subversion against the Nazi Kulturpolitik; as a resource for proxy presence in multiple social spaces (private homes, concert halls, opera houses, etc.) affording the construction and dissemination of composer identity and philosophy; as a technology of self for personal therapy; and in total as a resource for weltanschauung - world-building activity where composers construct and re-construct their social realities through musical creation – music as an active tool in and reflexive resource for individual social reality.

Thesis advisor: Stephen F. Brown / The study of Thomas Aquinas generally focuses on theological questions in his work, and ignores certain aspects of what might be called his "spiritual life." Though there are exceptions to this rule, there are numerous themes in the writings of Thomas Aquinas which have not been given their due. In light of this fact, this dissertation seeks to provide an extended treatment of two components of the work of Thomas Aquinas which receive little attention: the role of spiritual exercises in his writing, and the form of reflexivity--one's understanding of and relation to one's self--he recommends. As a way of approaching these issues, I draw from the work of two historical philosophers, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, using the methodological questions they employ in their writings on the classical world. Both Hadot and Foucault argued that there was something different about the way philosophy was accomplished in the antique world, something which was lost as philosophy shifted in the modern period. Hadot's work focuses, in particular, on the use of spiritual exercises in the formation of the person--that is, how a person becomes the ideal form they ought to be. Foucault, on the other hand, focused on the alternative form of reflexivity as found in the work of classical philosophers, and used it for fruitful comparison and critique of the contemporary forms of reflexivity found in the modern world. Both of these thinkers, however, never included in their study the medieval period, or at least not in an extended and meaningful way. Their questions, however, are particularly relevant to the work of Thomas Aquinas, as he offers both an extended treatment of spiritual exercises, as well as a form of reflexivity similar in many ways to classical forms. As a way of highlighting these two topics in Thomas Aquinas, I first provide an overview of the work of Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault as it relates to these topics. I then move onto a discussion of the current state of scholarship on "spirituality" in Thomas Aquinas, and suggest the ways in which this dissertation can improve on this current state. In the subsequent chapters, I begin a discussion of the concept of virtue as found in Thomas Aquinas, and its relation to both spiritual exercises and reflexivity, the description of which in Thomas forms the basis for the next two chapters. Finally, I turn to an in depth application of these methodological questions by turning to two different works of Thomas; first, I turn to his De perfectione spiritualis vitae, a short and rarely read work in which Thomas explains the practices which accompany the formation of a person in charity. Second, I turn to the Summa Theologiae and the cardinal virtues, drawing attention to the presence of spiritual exercises in a work typically treated as merely expositional. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Teachers' professional lives are situated at the intersection of local, national and global educational policy contexts. What they purposefully do (agency) and how they see themselves and their roles as teachers (identity) dynamically interact with such contexts. This study argues that in order to understand the meaningful professional development work of teachers, it is important to have an understanding of this interplay. Current dominant policy discourses concerning the 'improving teacher' and 'teaching as a craft' are examples of an over-reliant emphasis on more insular narratives of agentic teachers and teaching. As the research in this thesis shows, such narratives fail to take into account the complexities of factors and discourses that impact on the beings and doings of teachers, and are therefore inadequate. Based on an iterative dialogue between particular theoretical ideas and emerging case study data, the study proposes a multi-level integrating framework for understanding the experiences of teachers as they develop and locate a sense of their professional identity. Four teachers, from different types of English secondary schools, participated in the study. Data was generated from timelines, concept maps, lesson observations and interviews with the teacher participants. The case studies were presented as written portraits. Drawing on Archer's work (e.g. 2012) on reflexivity, the ways in which teachers' thinking mediated the links between their agency and structure were considered. The different modes of reflexivity that teachers employ and the ways in which teachers determine and facilitate personal projects of concern to them were found to be important to their professional identity and agency. The findings also suggested that the similarities and differences between the teachers were to do with how intersecting structural and cultural factors at global and local levels are mediated by individual forms of reflexivity. These forms of reflexivity are a reflection of evolving personal and social identities and an emerging social stance on society. The mediation produces particular professional concerns or projects that both suggest similarities that relate to powerful global discourses of education-such as performativity-but also particular types of agency and identity that are specific to those individual teachers' classrooms and general professional stance. The essence of the daily work of teachers appeared to reflect an intersection of personal biography and the situational structures and cultures of schools in which teachers operated, which brought about differences in professional thinking and doing. The thesis contributes to knowledge by adding to theory concerning identity and agency, as well as contributing to methodology by using portraits in understanding the nature of teacher agency and reflexivity. The factors that are identified and an insight into teachers' reflexivity contribute to the development of a toolkit for understanding teachers' identity and agency that may be useful for both teacher educators and policy makers.

This qualitative study considers the way in which the 6-Part-Story-Method (6PSM) process, drawn from the field of Dramatherapy, can be used to explore, interpret and enhance the professional practice of those working in the broad context of education. Evolving from social constructivist/constructionist and relativist perspectives, the study explores the concepts of reflection, critical reflection and reflexivity as socially constructed acts. This was a longitudinal study consisting of two stages; Stage 1 involved a number of practical sessions exploring the 6PSM model with Image Theatre techniques over the period of a year. Stage 2 involved an evaluative session a year after the cessation of Stage 1. There were four participants in the study all of whom work within the broad education sector. The place of story creation, telling, listening and sharing is discussed as a core way of individuals and groups making sense of their experiences. In particular, the 6PSM process is used to provide a structural and theoretical base to the methodological process undertaken in the study, and as the key component in the development of embodied reflexive practice. Furthermore, connections are made to the development of embodied, reflexive learning experiences created by techniques adapted from the theory and practice of both Image Theatre and Dramatherapy. Results from the study suggest that the use of the 6PSM as a vehicle for embodied and reflexive learning may be a viable and valuable creative process for educational practitioners to engage with. Further, the results have led to the connection of story, reflexivity and applied theatre to produce a 3-dimensional model of embodied and reflexive practice that has 6PSM at its core. Implications from the research relate to organisational policy changes to incorporate opportunities for the development of 6PSM processes within groups, and changes to initial training for practitioners within the caring professions to incorporate the model of embodied, reflexive practice using 6PSM.

This Report applies the theories of Structuration and reflexivity to the Internet in Amman, Jordan, to argue how the Internet can challenge authority as embedded in kinship social formations. In the first place, the Internet can be an empowering agent by challenging authority; at the same time, kinship’s social and moral codes can structure the reflexivity that users derive from the Internet and guide the Structuration to which the Internet can lead. This Report argues that there is a symbiotic relationship between the Internet and kinship. Situating Internet usage within kinship would challenge the ontological and epistemological centrality of the “the media text” in Media Studies. Furthermore, situating Internet usage within kinship would highlight users’ emerging Structuration, which can lead to counter-hegemonic currents in Amman. Then, the Report explains how and why an anthropological approach to media, including the Internet, would be especially suitable for exploring the Internet’s functions in users’ lives. Finally, the Report uses an interview of an Arab woman student to show how kinship’s social and moral codes structure user’s reflexivity on one hand, and the Internet’s ability to encourage reflexivity-- eroding kinship’s codes-- on the other hand. An anthropological approach would offer the conceptual and methodological tools for understanding how media usage in general is a social process, and that reflexivity and structuration emerge within that process, rather than assuming technological determinism. This is crucial in the context of the “Arab Spring,” where the Internet has challenged authority. Thus, this Report proposes kinship as a form of authority and social structure and the Internet as a conduit of Structuration. / text

This thesis follows and examines the lives of people in Atlanta, Georgia who own and advocate for the controversial group of dog breeds and mixed breeds known as “pit bulls.” The greater meaning of pit bulls within the United States is also considered from a historical and anthropological lens. This thesis uses pit bulls as a medium to explore issues of race, gender, and stigma in the United States and to consider how pit bull owners and activists use their understanding of the public around them to change ideas surrounding their dogs.

This thesis investigates reflexivity in ancient Greek literature and philosophy from Homer to Plato. It contends that ancient Greek culture developed a notion of personhood that was characteristically reflexive, and that this was linked to a linguistic development of specialized reflexive pronouns, which are the words for 'self'.