Dolezal, L. and Lucas, G. Differential Experiences of Social Distancing: Considering Alienated Embodied Communication and Racism. Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology

In this musing we consider how social distancing, the primary public health measure introduced to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, is creating social encounters characterized by a self-and-other-consciousness and an atmosphere of suspicion, leading to what we call “alienated embodied communication”. Whilst interaction rituals dominated by avoidance, fear and distrust are novel for many individuals who occupy positions of social privilege, Black and ethnic minority writers have demonstrated that the alienated bodily communication of COVID-19 social distancing is “nothing new” for people who routinely experience marginalization as a result of racism. Our aim in this musing, then, is to reflect on how on-going experiences of stigma, shame, and marginalisation can shape how social distancing is registered on an embodied and existential level, and therefore how social distancing may differentially impact individuals with lived experiences of racism.

Muffled Voices from Thai Pre-Service Teachers: Challenges and Difficulties during Teaching Practicum

The study aimed at exploring the perceptions pre-service student teachers had about their challenges and difficulties that hindered their teaching. The present study espoused a convergent mixed-methods approach, which adopted a questionnaire and semi-structured focused-groupinterviews as the research instruments. The participants of this small-scale study were B.Ed. Students at a university in Thailand. There were 78 participants in a quantitative phase, while 17 of them participated in a semi-structured-focus-group interview. The findings demonstrated around 4 dimensions of various constraints and challenges. This embodied: communication factors, instructional factors, student-related factors, and support-related factors. Based on One- Way ANOVA, most students appeared to face similar challenges. However, pre-service student teachers at early childhood and primary school levels highlighted the different challenges which they encountered during their practicum experience concerning various teaching methods used in their lessons. The findings also addressed some areas which needed improvement in the teacher education program. Recommendations were suggested to enhance practical and effective teacher education among future teachers in Thailand.

Awkward comedy and performative anxiety

"As more and more of our daily social interactions are mediated and experienced through the screens of communication technologies, face-to-face moments of unmediated sociality has become the terrain for "awkward," unedited encounters, fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and communicative breakdown. Text messaging, instant messaging and social networking sites are increasingly replacing embodied forms of communication as the preferred method for building and maintaining even the most intimate of relationships. The ability to manage one's performance within these regulated and highly-edited communicative spaces consequently emphasizes the vulnerability of the embodied social self, engaging in real space and time. The potential for failure inherent to any embodied social interaction is increasingly prevalent as a theme across a variety of entertainment media, suggesting that concerns with embodied communication performances are widespread. In this paper I will illustrate how representations of this communicative breakdown and the resulting moments of "awkward" silence form the basis for a new sub-genre of television comedy that includes both the British and American versions of The Office, Peep Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, among others. I contend that the popularity of these programs is a function of their adoption of unique aesthetic elements that reflect and address anxieties surrounding changing communicative norms specific to life in a highly-mediated social environment"--From introduction.

Awkward comedy and performative anxiety

"As more and more of our daily social interactions are mediated and experienced through the screens of communication technologies, face-to-face moments of unmediated sociality has become the terrain for "awkward," unedited encounters, fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and communicative breakdown. Text messaging, instant messaging and social networking sites are increasingly replacing embodied forms of communication as the preferred method for building and maintaining even the most intimate of relationships. The ability to manage one's performance within these regulated and highly-edited communicative spaces consequently emphasizes the vulnerability of the embodied social self, engaging in real space and time. The potential for failure inherent to any embodied social interaction is increasingly prevalent as a theme across a variety of entertainment media, suggesting that concerns with embodied communication performances are widespread. In this paper I will illustrate how representations of this communicative breakdown and the resulting moments of "awkward" silence form the basis for a new sub-genre of television comedy that includes both the British and American versions of The Office, Peep Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, among others. I contend that the popularity of these programs is a function of their adoption of unique aesthetic elements that reflect and address anxieties surrounding changing communicative norms specific to life in a highly-mediated social environment"--From introduction.

How Do Children Experience the Embodied Communication and Leadership of Teachers? Expressing the Voices of Children Through Artistic, Sensual, and Multimodal Methods in Educational Research

This article focuses on children’s lived experiences with teachers in school, and shows how a multimodal methodological perspective can strengthen the voices of children in educational research. The authors illustrate how a strong children’s perspective can be established with a methodical starting point inspired by phenomenology, critical utopian action research, and arts-based research. The inquiry is especially focused on how the embodied communication of the teacher’s professional practice is experienced by children and transformed from an often silent bodily knowledge to esthetic, artistic, and verbal formats. In order to understand the children’s lived experiences of life in school, they were invited into an open and playful future workshop. The workshop creates a dialogical space where the verbal, sensuous, emotional, and bodily expressions of both criticism and dreams can be articulated. It’s a space that can be seen as potentially activist material, because it allows for the dominance of the already existing structures to possibly be exceeded. Therefore, the article also includes children’s concrete artistic interpretations of the embodied leadership of their teachers. The empirical material shows how the artistic, visual, and aesthetic practices can transform the child’s lived experiences and contribute to creating an open space, where images, imagery, and metaphorical explorations are possible. The children’s voices show how they experience being seen, being invisible, or being touched by their teachers. They also show how they experience being afraid and exposed in the classroom. It is perhaps just here that the forms of expression in art offer a dialogic, collaborative foundation, where embodied experiences can be transformed into forms of knowledge that are more accessible to reflection and exploration. This could be a first step toward change.

Crisis and extended realities: remote presence in the time of COVID-19

The transformative influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on remote forms of communication has been a frequent theme in popular discourse during 2020, but any lingering transformation of what we do at a distance will rely on convincing and accessible forms of remote presence and interaction. Embodied communication is difficult to simulate, and this discussion examines current and emerging extended reality (XR)–based communication tools in a range of contexts to discover what role they may play in a future where crises of mobility are likely to grow more frequent and protracted. We define XR and its current uses, then examine key terms used to conceptualise it such as ‘presence’ and ‘social presence’, before highlighting social challenges of remote presence and ethical considerations that accompany its use, particularly how the technology might (or fail to) address important social problems, support education and have relevance to the future of work.

That and There: Judging the Intent of Pointing Actions with Robotic Arms

Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by extending existing models from the related literature. These principles are evaluated through studies where English-speaking human subjects view animations of simulated robots instructing pick-and-place tasks. The evaluation distinguishes two classes of pointing actions that arise in pick-and-place tasks: referential pointing (identifying objects) and locating pointing (identifying locations). The study indicates that human subjects show greater flexibility in interpreting the intent of referential pointing compared to locating pointing, which needs to be more deliberate. The results also demonstrate the effects of variation in the environment and task context on the interpretation of pointing. Our corpus, experiments and design principles advance models of context, common sense reasoning and communication in embodied communication.

Fiber, Fingers, and Code: Manufacturing Software and Seamlessness in the Garment Industry

This article describes how software is imagined and used to disrupt garment industry practices. Drawing from interviews, fieldwork, and discourse analysis of marketing from two companies, Stoll and Resonance, we argue that software is integral to the creation of a new kind of designer, a “digital craftsman,” that directly interfaces with a new kind of supply chain. This interaction is defined by its “seamlessness”—what we describe as both an emergent technical design element and an imaginary of software-enabled manufacturing free from friction between sites of concept development and its material execution. Counter to this imaginary, we mobilize the “tactile grammar” of seams to foreground the role of embodied communication and labor practices in shaping software-defined industrial futures. Studying the connections between fiber, fingers, and code, this article opens up new lines of inquiry into industrial software and into the links between media production and larger spheres of commodity production.