In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.

About the publication Embodiment and the Arts: Views from South Africa presents a diversity of views on the nature and status of the body in relation to acting, advertisements, designs, films, installations, music, photographs, performance, typography, and video works. Applying the methodologies of phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, embodied perception, ecological psychology, and sense-based research, the authors place the body at the centre of their analyses. The cornerstone of the research presented here is the view that aesthetic experience is active and engaged rather than passive and disinterested. This novel volume offers a rich and diverse range of applications of the paradigm of embodiment to the arts in South Africa. Table of Contents List of figures List of tables Acknowledgments Notes on contributors PART 1 Conceptualising embodiment and the arts Chapter 1 Embodiment and the arts in context Jenni Lauwrens 1 Plotting a course 2 Embodiment 3 Aesthetic embodiment 4 The sensorium 5 Too deep for words? 6 Overview of chapters Chapter 2 Enactive cognition in improvising musical ensembles: A South African perspective Marc Duby 1 Introduction 2 The promise of embodied cognition 3 4E cognition: A brief overview 4 Musicking and enactive cognition 5 Conclusion PART 2: Sensory scholarship Chapter 3 Sight/site-specific recording: Embodiment and absence Marc Röntsch 1 Introduction 2 Background 3 Embodiment and artistic research 4 Jazz ensemble playing 5 Blinding 6 On absence 7 Conclusion Chapter 4 The art of touch in remote online environments Jenni Lauwrens 1 Introduction 2 The significance and boundaries of touch 3 Out of touch 4 Holding hands over the internet: Telepresence, co-presence and the promise of digital touch 5 Chasing the Holy Grail of touch 6 Haptic visuality and the memory of touch 7 Conclusion Chapter 5 Outer space and sensory deprivation (or why is outer space so bland?) Amanda du Preez 1 Introduction 2 On blandness 3 What does outer space smell, taste and look like? 4 Falling down or falling up? 5 Gravity mimicked 6 Unfolding within the fourfold 7 Conclusion Chapter 6 The typographic sensorium: A cross-modal reading of letterforms Kyle Rath 1 Introduction: Function(s) of type 2 Design and the typographic sensorium 2.1 Sight: Type as image 2.2 Touch: Type as haptic and kinaesthetic 2.3 Sound: Type as wave-form 2.4 Olfaction: Type as scent and taste 3 Conclusion PART 3: Material presence Chapter 7 A haptic and humanising reading of the subjects of studio portraits and asylum photography in colonial South Africa Rory du Plessis 1 Introduction 2 The Black Photo Album 3 Interpreting photographs from the Orange Free State Asylum, c 1900 3.1 First encounter 3.2 Second encounter 4 Conclusion Chapter 8 Athi-Patra Ruga’s politics of disorientation: Queer(y)ing threads Adéle Adendorff 1 Introduction 2 Spinning tales and fashioning avatars 3 The politics of disorientation 3.1 Queer(y)ing phenomenology 3.2 Miss Congo and the table in the drawing-room 4 Casting off: Tying up loose threads Chapter 9 Seeing an image at the University of Pretoria’s Africana collection in context Sikho Siyotula 1 Introduction 2 The grass at the University of Pretoria’s gates 3 The world visualised in Ethnic map of Southern Africa 4 Visualising the Nguni estate or Shakan period 5 Visualising the Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe estate 6 Conclusion PART 4: Embodied performance and composition Chapter 10 Navigating dissonance: Bodymind and character congruency in acting Èmil Haarhoff, Marth Munro and Marié-Heleen Coetzee 1 Introduction 2 Bodymind and embodiment 3 Acting as an embodied craft 4 Actor-character dissonance and heightened awareness 5 Navigating actor-character dissonance 5.1 Choice and reappraisal 5.2 Actively applying heightened bodymind awareness 6 Conclusion Chapter 11 Advocating the importance of nonverbal communication in multimodal actor training Elri Wium and Janine Lewis 1 Introduction 2 Case control study 3 Nonverbal communication as an analysis model 4 Discussion of syncretic behavioural communication design 5 Data collection and analysis through a mixed-methods approach 5.1 Observation study 5.2 Analysis of habitual characterisation (coded narrative recordings) 5.3 Assessing the semi-structured interviews 6 Conclusion Chapter 12 Embodied composition ontologies, process and technology: Gesture heuristics and creative potential in music Miles Warrington 1 Introduction 2 Creative spaces 3 Compositional approaches, processes and models 3.1 Gesture schemas and embodiment of sound 3.2 Gesture signification 3.3 Problem solving and gesture models 3.4 Hyperinstruments 4 Conclusion Index

The four-volume set LNCS 8517, 8518, 8519 and 8520 constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability, DUXU 2014, held as part of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2014, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in June 2014, jointly with 13 other thematically similar conferences. The total of 1476 papers and 220 posters presented at the HCII 2014 conferences were carefully reviewed and selected from 4766 submissions. These papers address the latest research and development efforts and highlight the human aspects of design and use of computing systems. The papers accepted for presentation thoroughly cover the entire field of Human-Computer Interaction, addressing major advances in knowledge and effective use of computers in a variety of application areas. The total of 256 contributions included in the DUXU proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this four-volume set. The 45 papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on DUXU in the enterprise, design for diverse target users, emotional and persuasion design, user experience case studies.

Richard Rorty was one of the most important philosophers of the last half of the twentieth century. His work helped effect global transformations in the way philosophy thinks about its work and role midst contemporary culture. He was influential across a diversity of disciplines in perturbing our inherited self-understandings of the place of intellectuals in culture and the roles of art, literature, science, and religion in contemporary liberal democratic society. This collection of essays, by an international and interdisciplinary group of eminent scholars and thinkers in their own right, including Jürgen Habermas, Saskia Sassen, Robert Brandom, and Richard Shusterman, presents the first complete posthumous study of Rorty's work as a whole. The collection reflects on Rorty's myriad accomplishments, with particular attention on the role of pragmatist philosophy in Rorty's increasing identification of his thinking with the work of cultural politics. The book covers the full range of Rortyan themes, including the practice of philosophy and metaphilosophy, the politics of culture, and Rorty's place in the contemporary philosophical and critical-cultural landscapes. These reflections serve to both introduce the arc of Rorty's thinking and advance the critical reception of his work.

The contributors to Somaesthetics and Sport explore our embodied experiences of watching and playing sport, including sport’s beauty; the place of exercise in our sense of living a good life; and how we cope with pain and suffering.

The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy is a definitive introduction to the field, consisting of 15 newly-contributed essays that apply philosophical methods and approaches to feminist concerns. Offers a key view of the project of centering women’s experience. Includes topics such as feminism and pragmatism, lesbian philosophy, feminist epistemology, and women in the history of philosophy.

In the last three decades, the human body has gained increasing prominence in contemporary political debates, and it has become a central topic of modern social sciences and humanities. This collection of thirty original essays by leading figures in the field explores these issues across a number of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, with a wide range of case studies.

CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.

Mahayana, Theravada, ancient, modern? Even at the most basic level, the diversity of Buddhism makes a comprehensive approach daunting. This book is a first step in solving the problem. In foregrounding the bodies of practitioners, a solid platform for analysing the philosophy of Buddhism begins to become apparent. Building upon somaesthetics Buddhism is seen for its ameliorative effect, which spans the range of how the mind integrates with the body. This exploration of positive effect spans from dreams to medicine. Beyond the historical side of these questions, a contemporary analysis includes its intersection with art, philosophy, and ethnography.

This book is an ethnographic case study of Sufi ritual practice and embodied experience amongst female members of the Naqshbandi community. Drawing on fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, and Lefke, Cyprus (2013/2014), the author examines women’s experiences within a particular performance of Sufi tradition. The focus is on the ritual named hadra, involving the recital of sacred texts, music, and body movement, where the goal is for the individual to reach a state of intimacy with God. The volume considers Sufi practice as a form of embodied cultural behavior, religious identity, and selfhood construction. It explains how Muslim women’s participation in hadra ritual life reflects religious and cultural ideas about the body, the body’s movement, and embodied selfhood expression within the ritual experience. Sufi Women, Ritual Embodiment and the ‘Self’ engages with studies in Sufism, symbolic anthropology, ethnography, dance, and somatic studies. Contributing to discussions of religion, gender, and the body, the book will be of interest to scholars from anthropology, sociology, religious ritual studies, Sufism and gender studies, and performance studies.