<p>Cognition has for a long time been viewed as a process that can be described in terms of computational symbol manipulation, i.e. a process that takes place inside people’s heads and is largely unaffected by contextual aspects. In recent years, however, there has been a considerable change in the way researchers look at and study human cognition. These changes also have far-reaching implications for education and educational research. Situated learning is a theoretical framework in which sociocultural aspects of cognition and learning are strongly emphasised, that is, the context in which learning takes place is an important part of learning activity. The concept of activity is central to situated learning theories, but activity has been considered an exclusively sociocultural process in which the body only plays a minor role. In embodied cognition research, on the other hand, there is an increasing awareness that mind and body are inextricably intertwined and cannot be viewed in isolation. Findings in cognitive neuroscience provide additional evidence that cognition is tightly linked to perception and action. The aim of this thesis has been to investigate the role of the body in situated learning activity by integrating these different perspectives on cognition and learning. The analysis suggests that, like individual human conceptualization and thought, situated learning is in fact deeply rooted in bodily activity. In social interactions the body provides individuals with a similar perspective on the world, it functions as a means of signalling to others what cannot (yet) be expressed verbally, and it serves as a resonance mechanism in the understanding of others.</p>

This dissertation concerns the disabled veterans of the Turkish army who fought against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerillas as conscripted soldiers. While being valorized as sacrificial heroes, “ghazis,” in the realm of nationalist politics, these disabled veterans also face socio-economic marginalization and demasculinization anxieties in Turkey, where discrimination against the disabled is rampant. In such a context, disabled veterans emerged as important ultranationalist actors in the 2000s, championing a conservative agenda around the issues of state sovereignty, democratization, and Turkey’s pending European Union (EU) membership. In this dissertation, I locate the disabled veteran body at the intersection of medical and welfare institutions, nationalist discourses, and cultural formations of gendered normativity to trace the embodied socio-cultural and political processes that constitute disabled veterans as ultranationalist political subjects. I approach the politicization of disabled veterans through the analytical lens of the body in order to understand how veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of warfare, injury, and disability are hardened into an ultranationalist political identity. Exploring the tensions between the nationalist construction of the disabled veteran body and veterans’ embodied experiences as lower-class disabled men, I show how the dialectic between political rites of consecration and everyday rites of desecration translates disability into a political force. By unraveling the ways in which disability caused by violence generates new forms of masculinity, embodiment, and political identity, I illustrate how the disabled veterans’ suffering is brokered into militarization and ultranationalist protest in contemporary Turkey. / text

According to the Body-Specificity Hypothesis, experiences of habitual motor fluency cause people to associate positive valence with their dominant hand side and confer positive valence to items located on their dominant hand side (Casasanto, 2009). Can ongoing motor experience impact this association in the absence of visually lateralized stimuli? In Experiment 1, participants flipped cards using one hand and rated the image on each card with respect to how well it was described by positive or negative personal characteristics. Contrary to our predictions, participant’s ratings were not biased by the hand that they used during the trial. In Experiment 2, the task was almost entirely the same, though participants wore a slippery glove on their dominant hand to reduce the perceived motor fluency of the dominant hand. Again, participant’s ratings were not biased by the relative motor fluency of the hand used during the trial. Results indicate that ongoing motor activity may not be sufficient to activate body specific preferences in the absence of visually lateralized stimuli. / text

Giving students opportunities to ground mathematical concepts in physical activity has potential to develop conceptual understanding. This study examines the role direct embodiment, an instructional strategy in which students act out concepts, plays in learning mathematics. I compared two conditions of high school geometry students learning about similarity. The embodied condition participated in eight direct embodiment activities in which the students represented mathematical concepts and explored them through their movements. The observer condition participated in eight similar activities that did not involve physical activity. The students in the embodied condition had greater learning gains on a pre- and post-test, and those gains were driven by larger increases in conceptual understanding. There were also differences in the way the two conditions remembered the activities. On a survey given at the end of the unit, students in the embodied condition were more likely to write about the activities from a first person point-of-view, indicating that they had likely adopted a first person viewpoint during the activities. The embodied condition was also more likely to switch points-of-view when writing about the activities, indicating that they had likely translated among multiple viewpoints during the activities. This suggests translating between viewpoints is one mechanism for learning through direct embodiment. Students in the embodied condition also wrote more about the activities, which suggests that they remembered more about their experiences. Their survey responses included more mathematical and non-mathematical details than the responses from students in the observer condition. / text

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a sport on the rise within the field of martial arts in which competitors fight in a cage and utilize full-contact movements using their fists, elbows, and knees as well as kicks, other strikes, and submission techniques to defeat their opponents. MMA has become a modern social movement in combat sports that has become globalized in a short time and is the fastest growing sport in the world. MMA encompasses disciplines from various martial arts and Olympic sports such as boxing, kickboxing, karate, kempo, jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, tae kwon do, wrestling, sambo, judo, etc. The rounds are five minutes in length and there are typically three rounds in a contest, unless it is a championship fight in which case the contest lasts five rounds. The aim of this study is to analyze the bodily constructions and productions within the MMA culture and especially the constructed human violence associated with the sport. Based on autoethnographic participation in three Swedish MMA clubs, as well as shorter fieldwork case studies conducted in Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Brazil, and the US, this thesis investigates the interrelationship between MMA, excitement, sensationalism, and the spectacular physical violence that stains the participants’ bodies. Concepts taken from performance ethnography are applied to an analysis of what is reconstructed bodily. This is followed by an analysis that attempts to outline what body-violence means and how this understanding of the informants’ bodies, as well as of the researcher’s body-knowledge, reconstructs the definitions of MMA. A phenomenological approach to the concept of fighting is also included in relation to the MMA landscape. Thus, I present how the body learns the cultural enactments in fighting and how these forces shape the fighters’ gender, habitus, and way of resisting the discourse of critical opinions on MMA practice. Moreover, in trying to grasp the inner sense of MMA, I argue that the physical phenomenon of MMA is dependent on an intersubjective engagement and on the control of one’s inner coordination, which teaches a fighter how to deal with power, pain, suffering, aggression, and adrenaline flows.   Keywords: abject, adrenaline, anthropology, athletes, autoethnography, body, combat arts, culture, desire, embodied, enculturation, ethnology, fieldwork, field-making, flow, fighting, full-contact, gender, harm, homosociality, intercultural, interobject, intersubjectivity, martial arts, materiality, masculinity, MMA, method, pain, personal, performance, performativity, phenomenology, pleasure, posthuman, postmodern, power, ritual, risk-taking, rush, self-reflexive, sportive, sport, stained, struggle, suffering, thrill, UFC, violence.

Descartes and Malebranche often seem to argue that the self (or I) is identical to an immaterial thinking substance distinct from the body. But there are also many passages where they insist that the body is part of the self. This means that Descartes and Malebranche have a problem, since they seem to endorse three mutually inconsistent propositions: (1) I am an immaterial thinking thing. (2) Immaterial things don't have bodily parts. (3) I include my body as part of myself. I call this puzzle the self-body problem. It is a problem about understanding how we - the immaterial thinking subjects who engage in the self-reflective project of the Meditations - can incorporate our bodies into ourselves. I argue that Descartes and Malebranche have an elegant solution to this inconsistency. On my interpretation, the Cartesian self is not identical to an immaterial thinking substance. Rather, the Cartesian self is a variably constituted being that has different parts at different times and in different possible situations. Sometimes the self exists with both an immaterial thinking part and a bodily part. Other times it exists with only an immaterial part. The immaterial part is essential to the self, the bodily part is not. When Descartes and Malebranche say that I am immaterial, what they really mean is that I essentially have an immaterial part. But that is consistent with the claim that my body is part of myself. / Philosophy

In this dissertation, I look to contemporary menopause management in the Southwest, United States, as an ideal case study of the 'real world' negotiation of a widespread contemporary conundrum--characterized by discourses of risk, proliferation of information and choice, chronic doubt, and personal responsibility for decision-making. While there have been previous studies of menopause in the US, this circumstantial ethnography seeks to understand contemporary menopause management in an era characterized by a massive shift in the biomedical risk discourses about menopause, the explosion of therapeutic choice in a burgeoning pluralistic health care environment, and the broad expansion of women's identities, body projects, and life priorities over the last several decades.I report on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2007 and 2008 with menopausal women and health care providers in the southwestern US. Research components included ethnographic interviews (N=60) and focus groups (6 groups with 27 participants) with midlife women, interviews with health care providers across a range of therapeutic modalities (N=20), and observation of emerging discourses of menopause in science, media and marketing.This dissertation illustrates that contemporary menopause management is a recursive process characterized by the ongoing re-evaluation of the impact menopause is having on one's life--in context. Participants described the unfolding of the lived-experience of menopause over time--even years beyond the end of menstruation. Risk discourses are not embodied en masse but reflect the concerns most salient in women's lives. While women access various expert and lay resources, they favor personal experts--sources deemed professionally sound and personally relevant--and their own embodied knowledge. For their part, health care providers described themselves as "normalizing" menopause and practicing patient-centered care aimed at empowering women to make their own decisions about how to manage menopause. Lacking an ideal choice, women make provisional treatment decisions that resonate with their current menopausal subjectivity. Despite abundant options, menopause management is increasingly stratified, with some able to access more information resources and afford more extensive decision-support. Among women with severe symptoms, bioidentical hormone therapy--productively positioned between biomedicine and complementary/alternative medicine--has emerged as a popular harm reduction strategy.

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This thesis considers the links between identity and landscape in key works by American artist Roni Horn, focusing on a selection of her photo-installations and books. In particular it argues that Horn approaches landscape as a performative category through which to address the performativity of identity, and that in doing so her work privileges the viewer as an embodied participant. Drawing on a feminist approach grounded in phenomenology, the thesis locates androgyny as a key structuring principle in the artist’s work. Identifying herself as neither male nor female, Horn employs the notion of in-between-ness to negotiate gender binaries of male/female and to describe the indeterminate and contingent nature of androgynous being. Importantly, the thesis argues that Horn addresses these issues of identity by staging experiences in her work that invite the viewer to perform the very processes by which identity is defined and played out. This strategy is examined through concepts of doubling, the sublime, horizons and dwelling, each of which in their own way involve a sense of orientation and disorientation that gestures toward the in-between-ness of androgyny. The thesis also considers the tensions between visuality and embodiment in Horn’s work. Her use of photographic images within an installation practice is one that establishes a complex set of relations between the opticality of the photograph and the actuality of ‘real’ space. It is argued that the experiential potential of Horn’s photo-installations and books is only realised through the dialectical relation between visuality and embodiment in which both are equally privileged. / Full thesis with illustrations can be requested via Inter-Library Loan.

The principle objective of this thesis is to expand the term “technological sublime” to include technologies of artificial intelligence. In defining new realms of the technological sublime, we must not only consider the ecological integration of technology within natural surroundings, but also appreciate modern technological objects that instigate sublime experiences. This work examines science fictional portrayals of interactions with sentient artificial intelligence in I, Robot, 2001: A Space Odyssey and other major works of science fiction. In each of these works, characters who encounter technologies possessing artificial intelligence share sublime experiences. This thesis considers various levels of embodiment associated with the objects of artificial intelligence and discusses the sublime qualities of both cybernetic and android beings. Finally, this work examines how our perceptions of environment are altered by the introduction of virtual reality and virtual landscapes, which consequently affects our mindscapes and contribute to the technological sublime.