Nurses’ bodywork: is there a body of work? The work that many nurses do involves the use of their own body as one of the tools of their occupation. Being a nurse, in many cases, means controlled, purposeful use of her or his own body oriented to the patient. This paper discusses some of the ways in which nurses’ bodies and the work that those bodies do are represented in professional and academic research accounts and made relevant in literature. Using (...) instances of bodies and bodily activity mentioned in a variety of literature, the paper discusses three categories of accounts of nursing bodywork: those which are problematised and where the nurse's body is seen as a topic for investigation, and those which are unproblematised either explicitly discussing bodily activity (for example, touch) or implicitly dealing with bodywork (for example, taking blood pressure). Four ways in which nurses’ bodies are made relevant in accounts are proposed: relational, corporate, instrumental and human.The paper discusses the prominence (or not) nurses’ bodies are given in professional and academic accounts, as a contribution to preliminary work of generating a topic for investigation and concludes with some suggestions as to how this investigative project might be taken forward, focusing primarily on an examination of methodic practices, or how bodywork is brought off and executed as a skilled but taken‐for‐granted activity. (shrink)

This article looks at how parts of a social stock of knowledge can become insulated from each other via their uneven distribution both "horizontally" across time and space, and "vertically" with respect to degrees of embodiment in unconscious habits and routines. It uses ideas from Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Michael Polanyi, and others to argue that this insulation can produce a highly dynamic structuring of knowledge, awareness of which has the potential to help explain the existence of ignorance, (...) misperception, and multiple interpretations in different social settings. This potential is illustrated with examples taken from a study of American economists, showing how an approach considering insulation can improve understanding of at least one currently influential branch of knowledge. The article also suggests briefly how such an approach might augment recent theories of habitual action by accounting for both stability and change, and even help with some longstanding epistemological problems in social theory. (shrink)

The dominant discourse on dementia promotes a view that as individuals progress with the disease, they experience a neurological decline causing a loss of self. This notion, grounded in a Cartesian representation of selfhood, associates a loss of self as directly related to cognition. This paper presents an alternative anthropological framework, embodied selfhood, that challenges this representation. It then examines a potential tool, graphic medicine, to translate this theory into caregiving practice. Through analyzing three graphic novels—Wrinkles, Tangles, and Aliceheimer’s—this paper (...) demonstrates how tension exists between different conceptions of selfhood and associated implications for caregivers and patients alike. (shrink)

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it (...) is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. (shrink)

Resumen El propósito de este artículo es desarrollar una evaluación polémica de las premisas y las conclusiones que Giorgio Agamben despliega en la serie Homo Sacer . Específicamente, esta polémica se concentrará en el abusivo empleo de la genealogía foucaultiana. El artículo comienza con una exposición sintética de las tesis centrales de Agamben. A continuación, hace referencia a las debilidades constitutivas del paradigma estructuralista para pensar el cuerpo. Estas debilidades habrían sido superadas por la teoría postestructuralista de Deleuze, quien concibió (...) un modelo dinámico del cuerpo y del deseo, llegando a postularlos como el principio mismo de la praxis y la historicidad humanas. Este principio es asumido por el “materialismo antidialéctico” de Toni Negri, presentado como una filosofía de la praxis adecuada a un contexto de dominación biopolítica planetaria. Pero si Negri restituye la historicidad de la condición humana, su concepción totalizadora de “biopolítica” impide pensar un criterio operativo de crítica social. El artículo concluye exponiendo la noción de “crítica” que Foucault sugiriera hacia el final de su producción; a esta luz, explicita las razones que vuelven a la investigación de Agamben incompatible, no sólo con la propuesta de Foucault, sino con cualquier forma de crítica y praxis sociales de liberación. (shrink)