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Journal of Somaesthetics
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2246-8498
Published by Aalborg University

[18 journals]

Editorial: Aesthetics and Body Experiences in Health Care
- Authors: Falk Heinrich, Britta Møller
  PubDate: 2022-11-30
  Issue No: Vol. 8, No. 1 (2022)
Crafting atmospheres for Healthcare Design
- Authors: Esben Skouboe, Marie Højlund
  Abstract: This work contributes to the growing body of work, conducted on the vicinities between well-being and biomedical treatments in health design. The article presents and discusses the design of the new delivery rooms at a Danish hospital in Hjørring, including the multi-sensory artwork: Nordjyske stemninger (Moods of Northern Jutland). The authors are both artists, architects, and researchers in this project, thus it is not the purpose of his article to report evaluation results. However, it is our intention to share and discuss contemporary healthcare design strategies and point to the importance of considering the interplay between cultural, social change, and environment in order to bridge the know-do gap in healing architecture. Based on our work we give a concrete example of a case aimed at re-introducing art in healthcare environments, supporting the caregiver, the laboring mother, and her companion in the existential and life-changing moment. The article includes descriptions of the design process including interviews, observations, and reflections. In this case, we want to argue that the gap between visions and implementation in evidence-based design and healing architecture, must be understood as a symptom of a deeper epistemological and philosophical challenge concerning the dichotomous and demarcating understanding of the relation between the human and its surroundings, obstructing ecological coherence and validity and silo stacking of results not utilizing the rich potentiality of interdisciplinarity synergies. As it is difficult to convey a bodily and sensory experience in only words and images, we hope that the reader will use their imagination while reading the descriptions of a situated experience throughout the article. The Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Archipenko described the cause and impulse of creative motivation as seeing the absence of a thing. With this lens we invite the reader behind the scenes in the creation of somesthetic design of the new delivery rooms, now being the background of more than 1.000 births a year in the Northern part of Jutland. The argument of This article uses artistic practice to explore a new potential healthcare practice, with overseen and neglected potentialities in a supportive somesthetic healthcare design. The article is structured in four parts: Healing environments, Somesthetic design framework, The sensory delivery room, and Reflection.
  PubDate: 2022-11-30
  Issue No: Vol. 8, No. 1 (2022)
Breathing in Mortality
- Authors: Outi Hakola
  Abstract: The 20th century saw a strengthening of medicalization processes, which included a medicalization of death where dying and death came to be handled primarily as medical challenges. For their part, cinematic technologies participated in this by utilizing film technology to standardize medical processes, by using films for educational purposes, and by representing medical technology and knowledge in an authoritative sociocultural manner in film narrations. As a side effect, cinematic narratives have often portrayed death as a medical failure that people can and need to be saved from. Toward the end of the 20th century, criticism toward medicalization has increased among healthcare personnel and hospice and palliative care movements, for example. At the same time, as documentary films have continued to try to capture and understand the dying processes, in at least those films dealing with so-called natural death (due to aging or terminal illness), their tone has started to emphasize demedicalization aspects. I argue that this change in tone is recognizable in how the cinematic technology represents and utilizes breathing in the films’ narratives. Breathing—and particularly difficulty breathing—audibly and visibly embodies the fragility of the human body before death. At the same time, it conveys a sense of agency: Are you able to breath on your own' Is medical technology needed to do breathing for you' And how is the use of technology for dying individuals justified or not' I analyze the documentary films Dying at Grace (2003), Frontline: Facing Death (2010), Love in Our Own Time (2011), Extremis (2016), ISLAND (2018), and Covidland (2021), and through them I argue that 21st-century documentary films are joining in the efforts to demedicalize death and, as such, they are shifting the long relationship between cinematic and medical technologies.
  PubDate: 2022-11-30
  Issue No: Vol. 8, No. 1 (2022)
Care practice as aesthetic co-creation
- Authors: Britta Møller
  Abstract: Drawing on Dewey’s theory of aesthetic (1934) and Shusterman’s notion of somaesthetic (1999, 2006), this paper analyzes care practices as aesthetic co-creations; inquiries of impressions and expressions through which actors and practices are co-created. A care situation from elderly care serves to analyze the body as locus of sensory aesthetic appreciation and hence, as a potential process of somaesthetic experience and learning. Discussions are made of how to learn to appreciate dimensions of somaesthetic, and of the importance of somaesthetic for the subtle forms of power in care situations.
  PubDate: 2022-11-30
  Issue No: Vol. 8, No. 1 (2022)
Somaesthetics in early Korean history
- Authors: Jiyun Bae
  Abstract: This paper is concerned with first, reviewing hwarang in early Korean history through the eyes of somaesthetics, and second examining the educational implications of hwarang. Hwarang’s features (aesthetic ideology called pungryudo, their core activities, including songs and journeys) are highlighted from the perspective of somaesthetics. At the core of the hwarang’s activities are such elements as entertainment, pleasure, and joy. In the context of today’s education, the hwarang and somaesthetics promote the insight that one’s intellectual and practical life is integrated into one’s lifestyle based on these bodily experiences.
  PubDate: 2022-11-30
  Issue No: Vol. 8, No. 1 (2022)