Archives of place, feeling, and time: Immersive historical field research in the (Finnish) U.S. Midwest

In Summer 2018, I set out to find the feel of the places I have long studied as a historian, resulting in an expansion of my research process and ‘archive’. This article introduces and reflects on key moments and ideas from this research journey through historic strongholds of Finnish settlement in the U.S. Midwest. I discuss how following community leads and engaging with local knowledge-carriers made clear that my search for the past was intimately entangled with the present realities and future implications of demographic and economic change. I reflect on moments of being in place that allowed me to think through the inter-workings of historical memory and sensory imagination. This resulted in the integration of a photographic practice that serves as both a source and a tool for (re-)articulating feelings of particular moments in the field. I conclude by analyzing the fluid and multiple processes at play in the creation of research and archives. As a whole, this exploration aims to further embolden qualitative researchers to engage in sensitive research that makes space for feeling – both through emotions and senses – the productive and powerful pulls of time and place operating within our sites of research.

Characterization of kinesthetic motor imagery compared with visual motor imageries

Motor imagery (MI) is the only way for disabled subjects to robustly use a robot arm with a brain-machine interface. There are two main types of MI. Kinesthetic motor imagery (KMI) is proprioceptive (OR somato-) sensory imagination and Visual motor imagery (VMI) represents a visualization of the corresponding movement incorporating the visual network. Because these imagery tactics may use different networks, we hypothesized that the connectivity measures could characterize the two imageries better than the local activity. Electroencephalography data were recorded. Subjects performed different conditions, including motor execution (ME), KMI, VMI, and visual observation (VO). We tried to classify the KMI and VMI by conventional power analysis and by the connectivity measures. The mean accuracies of the classification of the KMI and VMI were 98.5% and 99.29% by connectivity measures (alpha and beta, respectively), which were higher than those by the normalized power (p < 0.01, Wilcoxon paired rank test). Additionally, the connectivity patterns were correlated between the ME-KMI and between the VO-VMI. The degree centrality (DC) was significantly higher in the left-S1 at the alpha-band in the KMI than in the VMI. The MI could be well classified because the KMI recruits a similar network to the ME. These findings could contribute to MI training methods.

La sensación virtual. La imaginación sensorial como facultad de la experiencia estética

A partir del pensamiento del filósofo francés Maurice Merleau-Ponty (y refiriendo diversos pensadores de distintas tradiciones filosóficas) ofrezco aquí una descripción de lo que llamo “sensación virtual” e “imaginación sensorial” para caracterizar ciertas capacidades de nuestra experiencia corporal que permiten superar la oposición entre percepción e imaginación, y hacen posible la experiencia estética, el arte, la cultura, y la vida humana y el pensamiento en general.From the thought of the French phi-losopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and referring to different thinkers of different philosophical traditions) I offer here a description of what I call “virtual sensation” and “sensory imagination” to characterize certain capacities of our bodily experience, which allow us to overcome the opposition between perception and imagination, and make possible the aesthetic experience, art, culture, and human life and thinking in general.

Mise en Esprit: One-Character Films and the Evocation of Sensory Imagination

This article starts out by introducing the category of the ‘one-character film’ — that is, narrative feature films that rely on a single onscreen character. One-character films can range from extremely laconic movies entirely focused on the action in the narrative here-and-now via highly talkative films that revolve around soliloquies of self-reflection, questioning of identity and a problematizing of the narrative past to strongly dialogue-heavy films that — via phones and other telecommunication devices — reach far beyond the depicted scene. It is on the latter that the article eventually focuses. Films like Buried (2010), Locke (2013) or The Guilty (2018) centrifugally thrust the viewers into a simultaneous present that remains invisible and that they have to imagine in sensory ways. Imagining this invisible elsewhere, which I call mise en esprit, can be facilitated and evoked through various cinematic means such as reduced within-modality-interference, suggestive verbalizations, acousmatic voices and sound effects.

Imagination – phenomenological approaches

When phenomenologists investigate the imagination, they approach it by examining how objects are experienced when they are imagined (rather than, for example, perceived) and what the experience of imagining is like (as opposed to, for example, the experience of perceiving). Their inquiries into the imagination are thus part of the greater phenomenological project of clarifying the different modes in which we can experience, or be conscious of, the world (or some objects in the world) and the correlating modes in which the world (or some objects in it) can appear to us. Mostly, phenomenologists consider what is often called ‘sensory’ imagination, that is, the experience in some sensory mode (such as the visual or the aural) of something not actually present. In order to emphasize its sensory and embodied dimension, they typically distinguish imagining something from entertaining its possibility merely in thought, which in other discourses is often referred to as ‘propositional imagination’, or ‘imagining that’. Of central importance, especially in post-Husserlian phenomenology, is the creativity of imagination. Moreover, the imagination is also seen to have an important cognitive and justificatory role insofar as it enables us to generate and consider hypothetical and alternative situations to those that we actually find ourselves in. Imagining is understood as an act (though not always voluntary or self-aware) of experiencing something as possible (rather than actual or necessary), which makes it central to questions of human freedom and to the phenomenological method itself. Although we often imagine things that are absent or nonexistent, most phenomenologists still consider imagining intentional. They call our attention to the many different ways in which we commonly relate imaginatively to absent, nonexisting or merely possible objects, events, situations or states of affairs. It might seem that phenomenological approaches, since they allegedly consider (only) how things appear, cannot distinguish between what is real and what is (merely) imagined. However, this is not the case. Phenomenologists may, for example, investigate how our beliefs in the reality or unreality, or in the presence or absence, of things are themselves founded in different modes of experience (such as perception or imagination) and motivated by different ways in which things appear to us (that is, as perceived, as imagined, and so on).

Materialising memories: exploring the stories of people with dementia through dress

ABSTRACTIn this article, we use clothes as a tool for exploring the life stories and narratives of people with dementia, eliciting memories through the sensory and material dimensions of dress. The article draws on an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study, ‘Dementia and Dress’, which explored everyday experiences of clothing for carers, care workers and people with dementia, using qualitative and ethnographic methods including: ‘wardrobe interviews’, observations, and visual and sensory approaches. In our analysis, we use three dimensions of dress as a device for exploring the experiences of people with dementia:kept clothes, as a way of retaining connections to memories and identity;discarded clothes, and their implications for understanding change and loss in relation to the ‘dementia journey’; andabsent clothes, invoked through the sensory imagination, recalling images of former selves, and carrying identity forward into the context of care. The article contributes to understandings of narrative, identity and dementia, drawing attention to the potential of material objects for evoking narratives, and maintaining biographical continuity for both men and women. The paper has larger implications for understandings of ageing and care practice; as well as contributing to the wider Material Turn in gerontology, showing how cultural analyses can be applied even to frail older groups who are often excluded from such approaches.

Subjective Computing and Improvisation

Subjective computingis an approach to designing and understanding computational systems that serve improvisational, cultural, and critical aims typically exhibited in the arts. The termphantasmal mediadescribes media forms that evoke and reveal phantasms: blends of cultural knowledge and sensory imagination. Phantasmal media include subjective computing systems that deeply engage human culture, imagination, and aesthetics through computer programming (Harrell, 2009). Such subjective computing systems can powerfully useagency play(Harrell and Zhu, 2009), the interplay betweenuser agency(actions that users perform on systems) andsystem agency(experiences that the system enables for users), as a basis for creative expression. This chapter explores the relationship between user agency and system agency as analogous to the relationship between improvisation and composition. The result is a model articulating how subjective computing systems can embody an aesthetic approach grounded in improvisation.

Cannibals and Orchids: Cannibalism and the Sensory Imagination of Papua New Guinea

This article examines Leona Miller’s book Cannibal and Orchids (1941) as an example of how place, in this case Papua New Guinea (PNG), is imagined according to a particular sensorium. It follows the ‘sensory turn in anthropology’ and the studies developed in the last two decades that take the senses as their object of enquiry. This body of theory is mobilised to analyse Miller’s biographical narrative recounting how PNG is imagined, represented and produced in terms of a disarray of the (Western) senses, coalescing in the trope of cannibalism. This article argues that the experience of PNG as the place of otherness is narrated both in terms of the author’s sensory displacement and of the indigenous sensorium as abject.