Kognitivismen med rötter i analytisk filosofi och logik beskriver tänkande som symbolmanipulation efter logiska regler. Begrepp har sin mening genom att de refererar till objekt och händelser i världen. Embodied cognition (EC) eller kroppsbasserad kognition, med rötter i biologi, fenomenologi och pragmatism ser istället tänkande som ett emergent fenomen som uppstår ur erfarandet av kroppens aktivitet i världen. Begrepps mening har istället sin grund i det sensomotoriska systemet.  Abstrakta begrepp får sin mening via metaforer och metonymer. Likt konstruktivism ser EC lärande som modifiering av tidigare kunskap. Den skiljer sig dock från konstruktivism i avseende på dualism, hur kunskap finns organiserad och var begreppens mening finns. EC:s inflytande på didaktisk forskning inom naturvetenskap och matematik undersöktes genom sökning av artiklar där orden EC eller enactivism finns med. Resultatet visade ett klart större genomslag för EC inom matematikdidaktik med fler artiklar där teorin beskrivs utförligare. Inom naturvetenskapens didaktik har EC uppmärksammats i mycket mindre grad. Orsakerna till detta diskuteras.

The musical performer’s embodied experience is an aspect of the performing process that has yet to be adequately considered in music scholarship. The embodied experience is relegated to the realm of the inaccessible and subjective, rather than being considered a valuable source of information for both the music analyst and performer. This thesis contends that the performing body can provide deep insights into musical meaning and can act as a resource for developing musical understanding. The sensations and experiences of the performer’s body during the process of creating music can lead to the recognition of important moments and fundamental meanings within a musical work. Engaging with scholarly literature from a variety of disciplines, this thesis will explore the classical singer’s embodied experience from the three primary perspectives of phenomenology, ecological perceptual theory and body communication theory. Each perspective is explored in and through a comparative listening analysis of Luciano Berio’s work for solo voice Sequenza III per voce femminile (1966) in order to illuminate specific aspects of the singer’s embodied experience. This embodied approach to musical analysis considers the singer’s body as a contributor to not only the production of sound but also to the creation of musical meaning, and can thus offer rich insights into that which is discovered through traditional analysis.

This study looks at dialogue and the rhetoric of space, place, and embodiment in writing by or attributed to early modern Englishwomen. The aim is to show how women speakers authorise their voices and identities through their verbal “positioning” of themselves relative to others. The strategies they employ include both the conventions of address that distinguish status among interlocutors and the imaginative evocation of how speakers occupy space. One premise of this project is the notion that the symbolic (including the verbal) and material levels of experience are bound closely together in the early modern imagination. Words could mean or make meaning on more than one level at once. This assumption helps us to see the way that subjects legitimate and “make room” for themselves through their representations of situated, embodied speakers and the boundaries and affiliations between them. The rhetorical manipulation of one’s “place”—both symbolically and materially—has often been overlooked as a significant feature of early modern texts, but deserves our attention as a useful strategy because identity was already conceptualised in these terms. They were woven into proverbial and official discourses that guided people’s understanding of self, society, and cosmos. Recent decades have seen an increasing critical interest in both the body and the material aspects of the culture in which early modern subjects come into being. As well, work continues to be done on gender and rhetoric in the period. My study brings together these two streams—embodied, “material” or “spatial” experience and the verbal details in texts—in a way that has not been fully explored. My focus on dialogue keeps the texts’ addressees in view, enabling us to understand that the “subject” emerges as part of a material, ideological, and discursive community, within which she creates connections and constructs protective boundaries. Further, this study considers an eclectic array of texts, bringing to light how diverse genres—early Protestant martyrology, pamphlet defences of women, selections of poetry, and drama—limit or enable women’s agency.

As embodiment riddles the body, this thesis interrogates embodiment as a riddle by foregrounding ethical, epistemological, and ontological questions of what embodiment(s) and bodies might be capable of creating and performing. Articulating local embodiments while also attempting to work through the puzzle of embodiment to playfully illustrate multiple responses to embodiment, this thesis incorporates images and discussion generated with a group of female PeeWee hockey players. Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Barad, Kirby, and Grosz, I experiment with articulating tentative, enfleshed, entangled, and emplaced local embodiment(s) through the hockey-bodies of female adolescent athletes. / Graduate

An overarching goal of my dissertation is to delineate social systemic processes as first and foremost embodied, experiential processes. I argue that such processes manifest through and depend upon the organism’s affective integration with her environment. Whereby, I delineate concepts like alienation and agency as manifesting through an affective intelligibility. Symbolic alienation, then, represents a circumstance in which institutional narratives purport moral or aesthetic truths that denigrate and deny the organism’s affective understanding of a circumstance. Agentic growth refers to the organism’s affective adaptation to an environment. Such growth follows from the process of working through experiential discordance (i.e., the disturbance of experiential flow or continuity) and manifests as a new-found sense of trust and understanding. Experiential discordance is an unavoidable occurrence because the organism-environment relationship is a dynamic one. If the organism is unable to mitigate and repair such discordance, she will face the threat of traumatization. Furthermore, those who disrupt the conventional-institutional organization or channeling of experience take on the character of dirt and thereby represent a dirty Other. If institutions react to the troubling, dirty Other by means of systemic repression, rather than genuine communication and reintegration, then said dirty Other takes on the character of shit. In such a circumstance, the presence of the dirty Other likely reveals deep, social systemic inadequacies and thereby ruptures the collective’s existential confidence and praxeological competence.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Since the Korean War (1950‐1953), over 170,000 Korean children have been adopted from South Korea and dispersed across the world to families in ‘the West’. As Korean adoptees reach adulthood, many are going back to South Korea through their own initiatives to understand their ‘past’ and to try to identify with a part of themselves that feels ‘unknown’. This study considers the significance of these dual transnational movements for Korean adoptees’ identities. Based on their lived experiences, this dissertation explores the ways Korean adoptees make sense of their identities in their adoptive countries and in South Korea. Specifically, it draws on social scientific theories to focus on topics of ‘difference’, embodiment, experience and belonging. Another key aim of this study is to examine some of the conventional ideas about kinship and identity that are embedded in a Euro‐American construction of adoption. Through this analysis, issues associated with adoptees such as ‘loss’, ‘incomplete identities’ and ‘a need to search’ are alternatively considered to be socially and culturally derived rather than unproblematically viewed as individual problems. Overall, this is a qualitative anthropological study that engages with Korean adoptees’ lived experiences as they work to situate their identities within shifting socio‐cultural contexts. A central goal throughout the course of this research has been to generate greater understanding about the complex processes involved for transnationally adopted people as they try to negotiate their identities within contested spaces of belonging. This study concludes by looking at the significance of shared experiences and mutual understanding between adoptees and the impact this has on their sense of belonging.

This thesis is a study of Italian women’s sensual embodiment in leisure and tourism experiences (involving beautifying in the city and tanning at the beach) in, and around, the city of Rome. The central link in this thesis connects the field of tourism studies with social cultural theories of the ‘body’, placing this research within the most recent theoretical debates on the body. It is argued that in everyday life people take their bodies for granted, yet the body is absolutely crucial to the way we engage with the world and the people around us. Through analysing Italian women’s embodiment, this thesis seeks to gain in-depth understanding of Italian society and more particularly women’s position in society, thereby positioning the field of tourism studies as a means for analysing people’s quotidian cultural habits. Embracing the critical paradigm, this thesis takes a reflexive and embodied approach to research, challenging the all-pervasive hegemonic dominance of positivist, masculinist Western academic approaches. Through post feminist lenses, auto ethnography, in-depth interviewing and document analysis were used to carry out the field work, with the central aim of capturing and contextualising Italian women’s voices and embodiment. This research shows Italian society to be strongly patriarchal, reflecting gender inequity and inequality. Women are dominated in discourse (politics, senior management and television shows being predominantly male), pressured into family roles, and objectified in society through the media and the male gaze. Paradoxically, women are empowered through choosing to reproduce patriarchal values of beauty and objectification (the power of the agency), and to embody these in a sensual and sensuous way, thereby reversing power relations in their favour. Aiming to understand Italian society through exploring women’s sensual embodiment, this thesis contributes to a broader understanding of the gendered construction of social identity, and of patriarchy and power relations, from a woman’s perspective. It contributes to gender and body studies in the tourism field through bringing these separate fields together, through exploring the power of agency in embodiment, and through the critical research approach to the body.

To be a fat woman is to experience a prolonged, personal battle with the body. The battle is enacted in a social context which is the site of remarkable consensus about the personal culpability of fat people for their bodily largeness; for women in particular the sanctions are especially powerful. In this research nine large women have engaged in a prolonged dialogue about the experience of being 'obese'. In the course of a feminist research endeavour, with a researcher who is similarly positioned, they have both contributed to and gained from a project which illuminates the experience of largeness alongside a critical examination of the discourses which shape body size.This dissertation critiques a dominant medical discourse which ignores conflicting research and supports a narrow view of health by simplistically linking increased body weight with poor health outcomes. Such is the hegemonic power of medicine that an examination of both nursing and popular literature in the area of study, reveals wide-spread acceptance of the notion that to be thin is to be healthy and virtuous, and to be fat is to be unhealthy and morally deficient. For nursing, the unquestioning obedience to medical teaching, raises serious questions about nursing's autonomy and separateness from medicine. Nurses have perpetuated an unhelpful and reductionist approach to their care of large women, in direct contradiction to nursing's supposed allegiance to a holistic approach to health care. Current strictures on women's body size and continued support for reduction dieting leave large women with the choice between two binary opposites; to diet or not to diet. Either choice has consequences which are traumatic and not health promoting. The experience of largeness emerges as a socially constructed disability in which many women are denied the opportunity to be fully healthy.

This interdisciplinary dissertation is a study of the ways in which we sensually embody and experience ow world. It is a metaphilosophical account that begins within orporeality; indeed, it is suggested that this isthe place where the philosophic urge is argued, elaborated, and reflected upon. While many studies of embodiment tend to focus upon "the body" as object, cultural artefact, or text for cultural inscription, the approach used in this dissertation is with the incarnation (the making flesh) of interaction in particular socio-physical milieux. The shift is thus from investigation of bodies to bodying, from noun form to transitive verb of incorporealization. This shift is felt necessary in order to better understand the so-called dualisms of traditional Western philosophic thought: mindbody, self-other, self-world, nature-culture, etc., and Tantric inspired Eastern philosophies of self-all relationality. It will be suggested, taking the lead from Leder (1990), that these apparent dualisms are not so much "add-ons" to philosophies of being, but arise in the experiential body itself. This dissertation endeavours to rethink certain "givens" of everyday life, such as perception of time and space, place, enacted memory, having empathic feelings for others, and so on, from within bodily experience and occidental-oriental philosophies of being. Certain neurological disorders are examined for their way of deconstructing elements required to construct a meaningful incarnated life-world. The process of embodiment is not only what the body is, but what it does. My construction of what is necessary for embodiment studies therefore considers bodily praxes (cultural and individual), as well as the sensual, sensate experiences arising in the body. The image of a ball game is evoked in various ways throughout the dissertation not only because it well describes the dense layers of interaction and an emergent sense of bodiliness, but it also illustrates reciprocity and situatedness. This thesis is intended to contribute to the health sciences as well as cultural studies. It draws upon the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, J. J. Gibson's ecological psychology, neurological studies and case histories, and the Eastern tradition of Tantrism in its Mahayanist Buddhist and Taoist forms.

Based on four years of ethnographic and archival research, this dissertation examines the pedagogical role of Sufi poetry (ilahi) in a transnational Sufi order, the Qadiri Rifa'i Tariqa (QRT). Extensive interviews in the United States, Mauritius, and South Africa (2008) are augmented by Skype, email, and telephone discussions conducted in Great Britain, France, Bosnia, Mexico, and Canada. Analysis of nearly twenty years of audio taped Sufi discourse and performance reveals how Sufi poetry enacted in ritual gatherings permeates everyday life. The study opens with a close examination of a poetic couplet from Yunus Emre (d. 1320), demonstrating that poetry is not merely a secondary aesthetic aspect of Sufism - as has often been argued - but is a critical component in the embodied transmission of Sufi knowledge. Chapter One presents Fredrik Barth's separation of knowledge into three dynamic faces - ideas and assertions, media representation, and social distribution - as the theoretical basis for analysis of the particular QRT understanding of the role of Sufi poetry. Chapter Two presents the evolution of the QRT from its roots in Turkey into a transnational order. It also takes a closer look at the Shaykh's singing of two ilahis in South Africa triggered by local tensions both in and outside the order. The transnational character of QRT dislocates this poetic repertoire from its Turkish origins, thereby broadening the logocentric scope of previous scholarly analyses. Chapter Three describes the formation of the current QRT poetic corpus, drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin's writings on translation, heteroglossia, internally persuasive and authoritative discourse, and intertextuality. Chapters Four and Five outline the epistemological, ontological, and cosmological assertions of the poetry. They focus on the specific experiential and embodied appropriation and production of spiritual enlightenment (marifet) by revealing how poetry enters the bodies of QRT members as philosophy, sound, and rhythm in conversation and companionship (sohbet) and in ecstatic ritual (zikr). In conclusion, the Shaykh is shown to be a poetic corpus - an expressive and creative body of Sufi knowledge - responding to particular socio-historical contexts. It is this state of knowledge that the murid (disciple), through love, is asked to assimilate (fana').