Global ETD Search

1	Fighting with the senses : exploring the doing and undoing of gendered embodiment in karate MacLean, Chloe January 2018 (has links) Karate is a sensuous martial art-come-sporting practice. Through a combinations of tacit exchanges of kicks and punches, sweaty touches, sweaty smells, aggressive shouts, communal laughs and helping tweaks of the body karate practitioners come to develop their practice, know their body and one-another, and assert their status in the karate hall. As a combative bodily practice, karate replicates an imagined, and often real, source of men’s power over, and distinction from, women. Yet in practice karate is an arena where women and men spar, sweat, and laugh together whereby, through inter-bodily, sensory, interactions, women can, and often do, out perform men. As such, karate presents a fruitful arena for exploring the sensory formation of gendered relations and embodiments of gender. Despite the integral role of the body and the senses to embodied participation in sport, and indeed in our gendered performances of self and distributions/assertions of power between women and men, exploration of the role of the senses in our sporting and gendered embodiment is largely absent from existing literature. This thesis argues that to understand gendered embodiment within karate requires reflection to these multidimensional, multi-sensory threads spun between sportsmen and women in embodied play. Building a sensory ethnographic framework for conducting the research, data was gathered from 9 months of ‘sensuous participation’ at 3 karate clubs engaging in mixed-sex and a women-only classes, 6 photo-elicitation interviews and 11 semi-structured interviews with women and men from across the three clubs, and reflections from my own embodied history as a karate athlete. The findings suggest that in both mixed-sex and women-only classes karate practice could ‘undo’ conventional performances of gender, and in turn gendered embodiments, through asking its participants to engage in a range of sensory bodily motions that are conventionally seen as masculine – such as combative movements and aggression – and feminine – such as control, elegance, and artistic performance. These embodied ways of being held magnified gender subversive potential in mixed-sex karate practice whereby ideas of men’s inherent superiority in sport could be challenged, and ideas of distinction between women and men could be challenged. Recognition of similarity as karate practitioners through shared physical engagements side-lined the importance of gender to practitioners embodiment. Together the findings of this thesis point towards the role of the minute, mundane, and thus often overlooked or unconscious elements of our bodily practice in ‘naturalising’, reproducing, or subverting gendered arrangements of power. In this way, this thesis contributes to sociological understandings of both embodiment and gender.
2	TASTING TEA, TASTING CHINA: TEAROOMS AND THE EVERYDAY CULTURE IN DALIAN Hou, Yingkun 01 September 2021 (has links) Tea is a beverage that has long been taken to symbolize a key aspect of Chinese tradition and history. However, it is one of many beverages drunk in contemporary China, where in recent times knowledge of wine has come to stand for the West and as a much-desired cultural capital. This dissertation examines everyday tea drinking and tea tasting in Dalian—a northeastern city in Liaoning Province, China. Through ethnography of practices, processes, and interactions taking place in daily events of tea drinking and tasting, this dissertation provides a window into social conflicts, ideas and desires, historical consciousness, and national identity, individualism, and collectivism, in a contemporary Chinese city. It explores questions of why and how people learn to taste tea by acquiring certain levels of knowledge and skill that is valued in tea culture, and how people drink and taste tea in different social scenarios and contexts. Then it explores the significance of tea drinking and tasting to people in their daily life and as part of ritualized social relations, and specifically in contrast to beverages such as wine. As representative of Chinese culture, tea tasting raises questions of how sensory capabilities should be honed and deployed, and the relationship between so-called “objective” scientific knowledge of taste and the tacit, embodied skill that is associated with traditional cultural understandings. China Dalian food anthropology sensory ethnography taste tea tasting
3	Building Home: Vernacular Architecture and Domestic Habit in the Ohio River Valley Gleason, Sean P. 19 September 2017 (has links) No description available. Communication Dwelling Home Sensory Ethnography Material Ecology Ohio River Valley
4	Sensing Traditional Music Through Sweden's Zorn Badge : Precarious Musical Value and Ritual Orientation Eriksson, Karin January 2017 (has links) This thesis investigates the multiple and contested spaces of belonging that may be evoked by ritualised musical performance. It makes an ethnographic case study of the Zorn Badge Auditions in Sweden, in which musicians play before a jury in the hope of being awarded a Zorn Badge and a prestigious but also contested title: Riksspelman. Building on theories of ritual and performance in combination with Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of orientation, the thesis attends to sensory ways of experiencing and knowing music while tracing the various ways in which Swedish traditional music is performed, felt, heard, sensed and understood in audition spaces. It draws on interviews with players and jury members, participant observations of music auditions and the jury’s deliberations, showing how musical value is negotiated through processes of inclusion and exclusion of repertoires, instruments and performance practices. The study also illuminates how anxiety and uncertainties are felt on both sides of the adjudication table. The auditions trigger feelings of belonging and harmony, but also rupture and distance. A brimming of felt qualities contributes to the sensing of history, tradition, memory, place and geography, as well as close emotional connections between music and individual performers. The thesis reveals how gradual adaptation, and the lived experiences of time within tradition, allow the Zorn institution to negotiate change and thereby maintain its position within Swedish society. traditional music Sweden folk music music auditions ritual orientation sensory ethnography ethnomusicology Humanities and the Arts Humaniora och konst
5	Probing the Pandemic: Participants as Ethnographers at Home Ball, Barith January 2020 (has links) This thesis aimed to investigate ways to conduct participatory research practices that would gain knowledge of participants' relationships and experiences with/in their physical home environment by using a design probe. Through the probe, a new approach to participatory design research was formulated. This approach gives agency to participants through elements of auto-ethnography, thus shifting the traditional power structures that often exist between participants and designers. This new type of research could yield greater intimacy and mutuality between designers and their participants. Due to this, it has the potential to be meaningful when designing for the home environment, and therefore can be used for research and design within the Internet of Things. Participatory design Interaction design Auto-ethnography Sensory ethnography Design probes Design methodology Internet of Things Engineering and Technology Teknik och teknologier
6	How Methane Made the Mountain: The Material Ghost and the Technological Sublime in Methane Ghosts Randall, William Sanford 06 July 2016 (has links) No description available. Fine Arts Film Studies Landscape Architecture Agriculture Philosophy
7	A Hipstory of Food, Love, and Chaosmos at the Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes Trocchia-Balkits, Lisa 20 September 2017 (has links) No description available. American Studies Communication Cultural Anthropology Economic Theory Experiments Peace Studies Personal Relationships Social Research Social Structure Sociology Spirituality Sustainability Food systems Self-organizing Affect Sensory Ethnography Counterculture Rainbow Family Mutual Aid Performance of food Interdisciplinary Social Ecology of Food Diverse Economies Complex Reciprocity Resistance Collective Action
8	Rytmen bor i mina steg : En rytmanalytisk studie om kropp, stad och kunskap / The rhythm lives in my steps : A rhythm-analytical study of body, city and knowledge Johansson, Sara January 2013 (has links) This thesis brings together a fascination with the city and a keen interest in the knowledge process. The point of departure is the bodily, sensory and emotional experience. That the author uses her own perceptions and experiences and is preoccupied with her own knowledge process means that she writes herself into an autoethnographic context. She also experiments with the writing and allows it to take on a more literary form as she writes about her own sensory impressions and feelings. The term rhythmanalysis is employed as a way of assessing, exploring, interpreting and understanding the world that embraces the embodied experience. Human beings are embodied beings, a claim we can make by referring to our own experiences as well as how we perceive, communicate and interact. The study delves into two aspects of rhythmanalysis, first as a way of describing the knowledge process as rhythm-analytical, which implies that bodily experiences are equally important as intellectual ones, and secondly as a way of talking about the city as polyrhythmic. It follows upon the latter that embodied rhythmanalysis of the city is possible. The rhythmanalysis may ultimately be seen as a project aimed at overthrowing the Cartesian dualism between body and mind. That we are embodied has a methodological consequence that is as simple as it is essential: the scholar exists in the world she studies. The researcher is not a neutral observer. She is a co-creator. She is a body, placed in time, space and history. She is situated, which means that her knowledge is also situated. Thus, the rhythmanalysis encompasses the body, the senses and feelings, and can be described with one key word: movement. It finds support in theories that acknowledge the fluid, the becoming, the situated, the performative, the relational, the dynamic, the material. It seeks methods that experiment, that focus on practices rather than discourses, that are preoccupied with a movable world rather than a static one. rhythmanalysis rhythm methodology method knowledge process movement city walking body mind embodiment Cartesian dualism affect emotion feeling senses touch sensory ethnography non-representational theory phenomenology new materialism/material feminism situated knowledge autoethnography memory rytmanalys rytm metodologi metod kunskap rörelse stad promenad kropp medvetande förkroppsligande cartesiansk dualism affekt emotion känsla sinnen känsel sinnlig/sensorisk etnografi icke-representationell teori fenomenologi ny materialism/materiell feminism situerad kunskap autoetnografi minne
9	Virtual reality and the clinic: an ethnographic study of the Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment (The CAREN Research Study) Perry, Karen-Marie Elah 26 April 2018 (has links) At the Ottawa Hospital in Ontario, Canada, clinicians use full body immersion virtual reality to treat a variety of health conditions, including: traumatic brain injuries, post- traumatic stress disorder, acquired brain injuries, complex regional pain syndrome, spinal cord injuries, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and lower limb amputations. The system is shared between military and civilian patient populations. Viewed by clinicians and the system’s designers as a value neutral medical technology, clinical virtual reality’s sights, sounds, movements, and smells reveal cultural assumptions about universal patient experiences. In this dissertation I draw from reflexive feminist research methodologies, visual anthropology and sensory ethnography in a hospital to centre the body in current debates about digital accessibility in the 21st Century. 40 in-depth interviews with practitioners and patients, 210 clinical observations, and film and photography ground research participant experiences in day-to-day understandings of virtual reality at the hospital. In this dissertation I address an ongoing absence of the body as a site of analytical attention in anthropological studies of virtual reality. While much literature in the social sciences situates virtual reality as a ‘post-human’ technology, I argue that virtual reality treatments are always experienced, resisted and interpreted through diverse body schemata. Furthermore, virtual reality cannot be decoupled from the sensitivities, socialities and politics of particular bodies in particular places and times. The Ottawa Hospital’s Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment (CAREN) system features a digitally enhanced walk-in chamber, treadmills on hydraulic pistons, surround sound audio, advanced graphics and user feedback utilizing force plates and a dynamic infrared motion capture system. The CAREN system utilizes hardware and software reliant on specific assumptions about human bodies. For example, these assumptions are echoed in depictions of race, gender, class, and indigeneity. Patients using virtual reality technologies can experience more than one disability or health condition at a time, further disrupting the idea of universal user experiences. As clinicians and patients confront the limitations of body normativity in the CAREN system’s interface design, they improvise, resist, and experience virtual reality in ways that defy design agendas, ultimately shaping patient treatments and unique paths to healing and health. / Graduate anthropology anthropology of the body anti-oppressive medicine CAREN computing cultural anthropology digital digital anthropology disability studies digital studies ethnography feminist anthropology intersectional feminist research hospital ethnography institutional ethnography medical anthropology medicine physiotherapy post-traumatic stress disorder qualitative health research qualitative research queer anthropology sensory ethnography video ethnography virtual reality visual anthropology traumatic brain injuries acquired brain injuries complex regional pain syndrome spinal cord injuries guillain-barré syndrome lower limb amputation lower limb amputations

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