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Authentic assessments in higher education typically imply the replication of real-world tasks. Psychological authenticity is the perceived alignment between an individual’s internal reference sources (i.e. personal values and beliefs) and their actions. Applying psychological authenticity logic to assessment tasks, we investigated students’ perceptions of scaffolded first-year assessment tasks on their health behaviour. In particular, we explored the meaning and value students associated with these tasks. One hundred students (86 female) completed an online open-text survey. Following our thematic analysis of the data, we constructed two higher-order themes. First, ‘the assessments were the catalyst for enabling self-reflection’ exemplified the opportunity students were afforded to reflect upon their current health behaviour. Second, ‘most changed for the better, but some stayed the same’ captured the dichotomy of student perceptions in completing the assessment tasks. Collectively, our findings offer new insights into authenticity in higher education assessment practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon the DeleuzoGuattarian metaphor of the 'rhizome', this paper proposes a literature and evidence review methodology that complements data collection, analysis and reporting methods appropriate to new materialist and post-human ontologies. Rhizomatic review replicates the branching and multiplying, subterranean and subversive, endless flows of affect that produce the social world in these ontologies of becoming and difference. The paper situates rhizomatic review in relation to Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of 'minor science': an approach that rather than attempting to represent the social world 'follows the action'. Rhizomatic review is open-ended, avoids setting inclusion or exclusion criteria, follows links that open up during the research process, explores a literature or evidence across disciplines, and engages in multiple iterations of searching and synthesis. An example of a rhizomatic review is presented, and the paper concludes with reflections on the opportunities afforded by rhizomatic review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of Australian higher education, Open Educational Practice (OEP) requires a collective response from researchers and practitioners to instantiate novel, sustainable, scalable, and evidence-informed educational practices. This article outlines practice-led research's (PLR) role in educational research in open education and its potential to drive transformation and knowledge creation for practice in and through practice itself. As a creative arts methodology, PLR foregrounds practice as the locus of research activities. Practice-led researchers are deeply embedded in the research process, and knowledge production occurs through the generation of artefacts, processes, and techniques. With a focus on real-time making and research, PLR promotes a culture of knowledge production through the active 'doing' of practice within a process-oriented framework. In this paper, OEP is reframed as a creative project, and PLR, with its stress on researcher/practitioner reflexivity, becomes a methodology capable of fostering open educational practices in becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a case study of teaching Cantonese to Hong Kong ethnic minority pre-schoolers using process drama. Based on Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of minor literature and language, becoming and de-/re-territorialisation, this paper aims to reconceptualise a playful adaptation of process drama developed by Joe Winston (2012) as a language-minoritising approach to the teaching and learning of a major language that is very foreign to children. The findings suggest that, to accomplish ethnic minority children's becoming Cantonese speakers, the theatre games and language play should involve minoritorisation and de-/re-territorialisation of the normative practices of process drama, the target language as well as learner identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author animates a different kind of telling and knowing for critical scholarship. Recognizing an unknowable reality through a journey to a mythical past, the author imagines an ontology of the serpent, a radical interdisciplinary, incantation for the future. This sorcerous evocation re-animates ancient mythical practices, forging a becoming that has not been realized. The serpent rejects a Christian, Cartesian, and modernist telos, recasting a different relationship with hierarchies that subvert radical forms of resistance from emerging. This paper ends within the embrace of anarchism, evoking the anarchist's "No!", destabilizing self and pointing toward wonderous, cosmic connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and life are intimately entangled. To grasp the underlying complexity of this seemingly simple statement, this article first introduces the approach to food/eating as an assemblage enacted by various heterogeneous components, and further develops it by engaging with actor network theory and material semiotics. Thereafter the focus turns to 'entanglement', as inspired by quantum physics, to elicit the basic dynamics of the entanglement of food and more-than-human beings, conceived of as involving mutual and differential becomings within and among assemblages. The article illustrates these entangled becomings by drawing upon examples from Sri Lanka, which in an intercultural philosophical fashion serve to establish an articulation (in the sense of a connection) between the proposed abstract approach to food and some basic premises of Buddhism and Ayurveda, a South Asian health system. Overall, the article crafts a conceptual toolbox and performs ontological groundwork wherein food and human beings as entangled assemblages provide a productive, refined, and sensitive research apparatus for the intimate study of more-than-human life and organization while also spurring novel theorizations through food/eating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Buddha's philosophy of becoming in relation to that of Whitehead. It questions how we might begin to understand the spatial production of organization differently if we move beyond Western concepts of space and time. While Whitehead provides a way to comprehend a world in flux, his approach to spatial becoming tends to transform processes (verbs) into entities (nouns) by halting their becoming. In contrast, the Buddha's perspective on becoming is not limited by the noun/verb dichotomy and does not revert to notions of permanence. This paper posits that the Buddha conceptualizes becoming as a continuous stream, while Whitehead portrays it as a series of events. The study concludes that the Buddha's concept of the 'specious present'—a fusion of his doctrines of 'dependent origination' and 'dependently arisen'—provides novel insights into organizational space that can be of value in sharpening the conceptual underpinnings of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond the notion of decision-making of career choice just being rational, this article proposes the primacy of 'affect' in the decision to become teachers over time. The article explores the becoming of immigrant English language teachers as an identity formation process, focusing on the lived experiences of 16 English language teachers since early childhood, mostly prior to their migration to Australia. Findings of the hermeneutic phenomenological narrative analysis of the teachers' reflective accounts revealed two lines of becoming and their intersections—the line of becoming an English language learner and the line of becoming an English language teacher through decision-making for career choice. The histories of their initial professional decision to 'become' English teachers demonstrate the interplay of socially produced desires and personal investment in professional learning and capabilities since early childhood. Through unravelling the assemblages within which their desires to become teachers were fomented and strengthened through embodied lived experiences over a long period of time, we argue that the concept of English teachers' 'desired becoming' informed their initial and long-term decision about career choice. This notion provides a window into the teachers' decision-making of career choice in terms of the formation of their professional identities as an interplay of the affective and the rational. Embracing and appreciating the combined role of the affective and the rational in teachers' becoming is important to consider in future research in this area as well as for teacher recruitment and retention, hence potentially addressing critical teacher shortages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "cyborg" in Donna Haraway's much-discussed "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) is outstanding in its depiction of the hybrid body that is untouched by long-standing polar dichotomy stemming from a hierarchal mode of thinking founded on prehistoric anthropocentricism: a worldview embedded mostly in western cultures which considers (normal1) human beings to be superior to nature and has often resulted in victimization of the so-called other. Haraway's cyborg is capable of "becoming" animal or machine and is, hence, better suited to the Posthuman world. Following in Haraway's footsteps, we intend to discuss that autistic people – labeled/stigmatized as intellectually disabled – are able bodies that share close affinities with animals, robots, nature, and environment. To this purpose, Sabina Berman's debut novel Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World (2012)2 is examined to help us draw an analogy between a cyborg figure and an autistic body to bring to light the necessity of inclusion of all as prescribed by Posthumanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the view that an ontological shift to complexity thinking will be significant in the future of physical education (PE). Complexity thinking not only moves PE beyond long dominant modernist approaches but also offers the opportunity to integrate many of the postmodern perspectives that currently seek to frame PE. Four interconnected complexity commonalities, becoming, lived time, self-organisation and boundaries, are presented in an overarching frame to guide future PE developments in ways that are coherent, connected and emergent. PE is subsequently viewed as a complex phenomenon that is always in a non-linear, messy and never-ending process of becoming. Students, teachers and other stakeholders are also complex as their past, present and future experiences constantly merge in a lived time unity to create lifelong and life-wide PE journeys that are both personalised and holistic. Central to these personalised journeys is each stakeholder's ability to self-organise and influence the trajectory of their pathways. Self-organisation, however, is not a relativist 'anything goes' phenomenon but a process that takes place within a multiplicity of boundaries. While boundaries may traditionally be viewed as divisive features, complexity thinking recognises that many boundaries are flexible and enable the creation of 'boundary spaces' in which 'rich' discussions can take place to develop more coherent, connected and emergent forms of PE. Transdisciplinary Inquiry (TDI) and Ecologically Informed Practice (EIP) are presented as perspectives that can help teachers, and others, create the 'boundary spaces' in which ways to plan and introduce complexity-informed forms of PE can be explored. The paper concludes by proposing that the challenge for PE in the future will be for practitioners to develop the adaptability, openness, confidence and self-organising skills that will be needed to make the most effective use of the 'rich interactions' that these 'boundary spaces' offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on biographical research among the Akamba and the Luo communities in Eastern and Western Kenya, respectively. Our research explored how practices of adolescence as a process, an institution, and a performance of identity interact with colonial modernities and imaginaries in complex ways. The biographical research was carried out predominantly with women born in the late colonial period in Kenya. We provide critical reflections on the process and affordances of our embodied storytelling approach, which we position as an Africanist methodology and a decolonial research practice. This research and approach provided women with a space to narrate and perform their lived experience, potentially disrupting epistemic inequities that are embedded in the way research on growing up in the past is carried out. The discussions show how colonialism interacted with other factors, including gender and generational power, tradition, girls' agency, and other life characteristics like poverty and family situation, in order to influence the lived experiences of women. Going beyond the narratives of victimhood that characterise coming of age in similar spaces, we present women's emergent, incomplete, and incongruent agency. We position this agency as the diverse ways in which people come to terms with their difficult contexts. The discussion also points to the need for unsettling the settled thinking about girlhood and coming of age in specific historical spaces in the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deleuze and Guattari's becoming is a dynamic alliance with beings. It is not a monad but creative involution. The incorporeal becoming deterritorialises the beings and roams nomadically between them. It has no subject or object, nor does it have centre or periphery; it is a becoming-in-itself. This article analyses the differences between Nietzsche's becoming and that of Deleuze and Guattari. It also summarises the three attributes of a becoming, which is solipsistic, revolutionary and always in-between. Julian Barnes's novel Love, etc exclusively utilises monologues as the narrative device which, along with its minimal personae, penetrating conflict and unsettling ending, prompts a becoming-Greek tragedy similar to Antigone. The becoming-Greek tragedy is not a simple average of the two beings; rather, it is a heterogeneous, molecular interbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the journey of a group of psychoanalysts from the Società Italiana di Psicoanalisi della Relazione (SIPRe) that, from the 1980s to the present, has led to the hypothesis of a theory based on a unitary Subject in becoming. To the concept of Relation, understood not in a phenomenal sense but as structuring the psyche and individual behavior, were juxtaposed, with reference to the development of the human being, the moments of the Hegelian dialectic – thesis, antithesis and synthesis – understood as the passage from the prereflexive to the reflexive and the self-reflexive. From this initial reflection, we then came to distinguish between direct consciousness, characteristic of the first eighteen months of life, reflective consciousness, foundational to individual identity, and self-reflective consciousness, a capacity acquired by the human, which is expressed in the narrative of oneself made to oneself and others and refers to the perception of one’s own identity, based on unconscious determinants. In the group’s journey, these moments of development were articulated as co-present expressions of an ongoing process, leading to the formulation of the concept of the unitary Subject in Becoming: a system, always striving toward a beyond, that self-organizes and incessantly makes itself in relationship with the other, from a perspective that frames it as coinciding with its becoming. Seeking to nurture the vital openness to future theoretical developments, its clinical implications are traced through a vignette. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common to encourage people to envision life as a process of fulfilling their potential. But what exactly does this mean? Traditionally, this question has been addressed by way of 'complementarity'; dividing the human into biological and cultural components. Fulfilment is placed on the side of the cultural; an acquisition of encoded secondary information transmitted from predecessors that represents what it means 'to know'. Potential has been defined from the biological, as a suite of innate capacities localised to the mind and body, passed on through a mechanism of genetic inheritance. Founded upon a metaphor of inter-generational transmission, this perspective leads to a conceptualisation of life as a progressive closure, 'filling up' the biologically innate with the culturally acquired. However, despite its prominence, this static view leads to a troubling question: with one's potential fulfilled, where is one to go next? In this theoretical commentary, we offer an alternate, dynamical account of potential and fulfilment by leaning on Ingold's notion of wayfaring. From this perspective, life is not a process of being 'filled up' with secondary information, but of responsively 'opening up'; corresponding with varied experiences cast forward by others, as they to ours, situated within a continually unfolding field of relations. Ontologically, this view is of 'us', not as beings, but becomings, finding our way along generative paths inhabited alongside others. Knowledge is not transmitted inter-generationally, but is grown by primarily experiencing the coming-into-being of things we enter into correspondence with. Initiated through a prologue, these ideas are exemplified in sharing our storied journey as sport scientists in-becoming, following not objects of convention, but corresponding with things of curiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon the current concern with relational, processual and assemblage approaches to place, this paper argues for a move away from 'pointillist' and constructivist accounts of the assembling of places because they reinforce binaries, reintroduce structures and highlight singular representational moments in the building, identification and dismantling of places. Drawing upon Deleuze's philosophy of difference and Simondon's writings on individuation, I suggest that places can more usefully be seen as events of crystallisation, distillation or folding characterised by multi-phased processes of individuation through which distinctive 'individual-milieu coupling[s]' emerge, refocusing attention on the open-ended, plural and eventful qualities of places-in-becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the ways in which Kafka's drawings position themselves adamantly in the middle of things: temporally both through the foregrounding of their own becoming and through dynamic evocations of motion, as well as interpersonally through networks of performance and observation. The article juxtaposes images with texts such as "Wunsch, Indianer zu werden," "Der Kübelreiter," and sections of letters that describe the process of drawing to argue for a generative rather than privative sense of incomplete becoming that functions differently in the two media. It also explores how meanings arise and vary through relation and perspective. The images reflect self-referentially on the visual medium through depicted acts of observation, and also offer a visual commentary on textuality through expressive portraits of Kafka's own relatives reading. The drawings' sketchiness—their dynamic refusal of closure—enables a theory of humor in Kafka's work as arising from the way the viewer is "drawn into" the images. The recognition of one's own implication in this prolific openness of bodies and in the always-undercut drive to find meanings reveals the viewer as a co-inhabiter of an absurd and yet vibrant world in flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Heidegger, Severino called 'technology' the lógos that interprets the world according to our fundamental belief in téchne. He considered Giacomo Leopardi to be the only thinker who brought this ideology to its logical conclusion: if we can transform the world, then everything is meaningless. We try to escape this conclusion, but if Severino is right, we cannot. His philosophy thus reminds us that we still aren't aware of the fundamental meaning of our beliefs. Confronting its arguments may help us become more self-aware and, perhaps, even move us to question the unquestionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a dream|dance in visual, metaphoric, and haptic image by engaging creation-centered poetic inquiring as a unique rendering of embodied reflexivity through the arts. Our lyric text, a songscape, framed by the interplay of chorus and storying verse, enacts the movement and mood of a dance. Red threads and feathers, as partners, symbolize the voice and agency of entities becoming within the complex relational-ecologies with whom we live. This songscape advances creation-centered research by demonstrating Whitehead's ontology of becoming—process prioritized over substance—where bodily feelings provide the earthen richness through which images, emotions, hopes, and thoughts emerge. Working from modes of reflexivity within animate paradigms advances relational consciousness by foregrounding agential landscapes, ancestors, psychscapes, and our dependent co-arising. Here, relational consciousness reveals Nature—in all its forms—as a co-creative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche highlights the figure of Anaximandro as a philosopher who introduces moral questions into ontology, by problematizing the Becoming. Nietzsche characterizes Heráclito as the philosopher who answers Anaximandro. In this article, we intend to a) describe Nietzsche's methodology for reading the ancient philosophers, through the combination of philosophy and personality. b) Present the Anaximandrian arkhé, the apeiron, through a rapprochement with Schopenhauer's pessimism, carried out by Nietzsche himself; c) show how Heraclitos' opposition to Anaximandro reflects Nietzsche's own reaction to Schopenhauer, so that Heraclitos' presence in Nietzsche's philosophy is configured simultaneously as an influence and as a mask of Nietzsche's own thought. We argue that Nietzsche's aim, above all through the notions of "play", "necessity" and "agonism", is to provide an aesthetic response to the problem of becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gilles Deleuze spends his whole life exploring the question of what philosophy is by unconventional approaches to establish the ontology of Becoming and he collaborates with Félix Guattari, integrating Chinese thought into his philosophical discourse directly to support the Becoming theory. Different from the tendency to associate Deleuze's references to Tao with the philosophy of arts or body aesthetics, this paper argues Tao is introduced because of the consistency with the multiplicity of immanence raised by Deleuze who has updated the connotation of Western philosophical concepts with the help of Tao. Therefore, Tao is no longer defined as the ultimate Being claimed by some French sinologists and philosophers, but as an internal field or the Plane. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the immanence without any certainty (the multiplicity of immanence) itself is a kind of nomadic life, which is also the real meaning of Tao. In this way, Chinese philosophy's function has far more significant than footnotes and evidence in the construction of Deleuze's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Nietzsche’s intellectual integrity, with a view to showing that despite his attempt to overcome metaphysics, using this concept, Nietzsche remains within the comfort of metaphysics. Intellectual integrity represents Nietzsche’s unique style of questioning and his critical method of analysing Western metaphysical foundations. It is a flexible and dialectic principle, which approaches the question of ‘being’ as a dynamic process of endless interpretations and becoming, instead of as a fixed essence or a metaphysical absolute. Attempts are made, in the paper, to examine the dynamics of Nietzsche’s intellectual integrity, as well as its intimate link with other key concepts in his philosophy. To achieve its goal, the paper adopts the method of historical hermeneutics and textual analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights how international multilingual students' experience with academic writing influences their sense of (not) belonging. Beliefs about ourselves as individuals are shaped by our experiences of belonging to being positioned in various groups. Drawing on the notion of writing as an act of identity, of self-representation, we explore the boundaries often set on international students in New Zealand, whose writing is frequently seen as deficient. This deficit view often allocates these socioculturally and linguistically diverse students to the margins, not belonging to the highly guarded and prestigious space of academia. Through taking an autoethnographic approach to their respective academic and doctoral journeys, Ana Maria and Smridhi situate the concept of 'becoming' a scholar as one that intersects with a developing sense of belonging. They address the impact of 'homogenising' expectations of academic writing, critique the 'unawareness' of academic gatekeepers, assumptions about master's and doctoral writers' knowledge, and the lack of recognition of power struggles and geopolitical contrasts for international students who are striving to develop their scholarly selves. Their scholarly identity is connected to students' sense of belonging to academia and to the community of researchers at universities, often a very unequal context. The authors will discuss how those in an academic community align themselves with socioculturally shaped subject positions, thereby playing their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses and the values, beliefs and interests they embody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflection offers a close perspective of a long-term mentoring, collegial and friendship relationship I had with Charles Garvin, lifetime member of the International Association of Social Work with Groups (IASWG) and group work scholar. Charles Garvin passed away peacefully in August, 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of paradox in contemporary Latin American literature, arguing that modernity embraces contradiction as part of its essence. The literature of Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector reflects this paradoxical duality. The text also highlights the growing presence of the paradoxical spirit in Latin American culture, as evidenced in literary and musical works. Additionally, the article addresses different literary and philosophical approaches related to Latin America, emphasizing the diversity and multiplicity of perspectives in the region. [Extracted from the article]

Partisan and decolonial ecology is a notion addressed by Andreas Malm and Malcom Ferdinand respectively, in their texts on the Caribbean maroon partisans - the emancipated slaves - who moved to the more mountainous parts of the islands that were still covered by dense vegetation. This concept is here taken to another historical context, that of Yugoslav partisans' fight against the fascist occupation in the Second World War. I engage in reading an array of partisan artworks that point to fascist domination/war over nature juxtaposed to emerging solidarity among humans and animals/nature. From poems and short stories to drawings and graphic art material, the subject matter of forest as a site of resistance and political subjectivity emerges. Diverse animals, pack of wolves, birds that continue to sing despite the thorny branches, the figure of the snail as the affect and attitude of resilience - these become "comrades" in the struggle, mobilizing nature in their fight against fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: How can one conceptualize change in societies? What do ethnographies reveal about societies in transition? In elucidating what societal changes entail, this article discusses ethnographies that focus on "societies in transition." An ethnography that deals with changes in and of society also analyzes people's experiences in a rapidly changing society. In addition to giving analytical perspectives on a region—in this case, gendered ideas and practices in Bangladesh—such ethnographies may guide us to opening new social realities. Hence, ethnographies can reveal the potentialities and temporalities of social systems. Additionally, containing the possibilities of an otherwise within itself, ethnographies reflect critiques of established concepts. Thus, one gets glimpses of the continual becoming of the social rather than seeing it as a bounded system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes new insights to research on citizenship and young citizen subject formation in the context of the posthuman condition. Bringing a feminist materialist sensibility to bear, we explore citizenship as materially mobilised and produced. Considering the constitutive role that embodied and affective phenomena play in this production, we attend particularly to acts of citizenship. We show by way of vignettes how human subjects and material and natural objects 'intra-act' to produce civic capacities and bring citizen subjectivity into effect. The forces by which these capacities are produced come into view inviting challenge to normative, human-centred framings of (youth) citizenship. The forces in question are various—affective, corporeal, temporal, spatial, spectral—but it is affect that provides the main impetus to action. Supplementing the more conventional frame of citizenship as belonging, we propose a framework of citizen becoming as a generative way to think and do citizenship in the posthuman present. The argument is made that analytic frames that attune to citizenship as an affective movement of becoming best address current conditions for producing citizen subjects and usefully extend individualised models of citizenship that have long influenced education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the meanings of different technologies, especially vehicles and digital technologies, in the lives of young rural people. This article combines two different qualitative longitudinal data collections from rural areas of Finland. We employ a new materialist framework, especially the Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage theory and the theoretical concept of becoming. We ask how rural places, youth, and technologies assemble in everyday life. We argue that rural youth becomings assemble not only with traditional technologies, such as mopeds, snowmobiles, and cars, but also with digital technologies, the internet, and social media. In this article, we suggest that rural youth research would benefit from theoretical and methodological reiterations of different rural materialities and human and non-human fluxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Viewpoints paper, I consider the role of family dialogue in shaping political agency and morality in relation to climate change and ecological destruction, drawing on insights from Common Worlds pedagogy. Common Worlds educators and researchers invite adults to attend to the questions children ask about the world as openings for unsettling dominant narratives of extractive settler colonialism. Moving this approach out of the classroom towards other intergenerational encounters, I suggest that interactions between children and parents can offer fleeting encounters for becoming response-able in multispecies worlds. Considering childing as a process of becoming, Common Worlds scholars and educators adopt a process ontology within adult–child interactions, opening up the possibility of adults, too, ‘becoming’ in the space–time of educational encounters. Drawing on conversations with my 5-year-old, I consider how encounters with the children in our lives can offer possibilities for re-casting ethical and political questions of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between student mobility and identity by exploring the meaning of 'home' and homemaking processes among international students. It unpacks students' complex web of relations within and between places, across space and in time, and illustrates how students' family homes, familiar places and home society inform and shape the students' existence and 'becoming' while they are abroad. Applying a spatial approach, this paper exhibits that international students' involvement is a spatial homemaking process that connects home as sensory everyday practices and experiences and home as a place of origin. Both relationships in distance and proximity are necessary and important elements in practices of homemaking processes among international students. By examining space relationally, the narratives of the students show a significant refiguring of an embodied self, concurrently highlighting the relational construction of the identity of place. The empirical findings of this paper bring new dimensions, such as the spatial, geographical, sensory, and affective nature of mobile belongings, to the research on youth mobility and internationalisation of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The result of the 2022 plebiscite in Chile indicates a new stage of the Chilean neoconservative and oligarchic reaction, as well as of the mood of the social forces that developed with the 2019 revolt. Drawing on political research collective Vitrina Dystópica's archive of dialogues, interviews, and interventions, this article proposes an analytical exercise that seeks to challenge the ongoing totalitarian coup of the political imagination. This exploration of the memory of struggles allows for gathering techniques, strategies, and moments of vitalization to affirm the affective defeat and recompose collective forces in new questions for the future, joy, and dignity. The reflections shared here take place in a concrete practice of political reorganization that the authors call espacio.tierra, and they argue that the revolt does not start on October 18, 2019, nor does it end with the plebiscite on September 4, 2022; rather, it exists in the affective infrastructures over which collective questions and practices are raised for the reproduction and multiplication of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the possibilities and limits of Paul Preciado's (2008) book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie) to inspire gender becomings. A genre-fluid "body-essay," Preciado's text follows his self-administration of testosterone in what he terms the pharmacopornographic era, a modern iteration of Foucault's biocapitalism. After designating Preciado's self-generated transformations as becomings, I explore how the book's heterotopic spaces-including its genre-facilitate Preciado's quest for a gender identity that cannot be labeled. A Foucauldian term, "heterotopia" has not yet been applied to Testo yonqui or other transgender texts, and it provides a productive template for the complex interplay of individuals and society. While I critique the vulnerability of heterotopias, and, by proxy, of Testo yonqui, to harmful power dynamics, I ultimately uphold Testo yonqui's ability to destabilize rigid narratives of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is to reconstruct the process of becoming a caregiver working in early childhood and care (ECEC) daycare centres for children up to three years of age in Poland. The theoretical framework is the concept of becoming, through which the formation of professional identity, within the social world of the nursery, is reconstructed. The process of becoming a nursery caregiver takes place within a specific historical, political, social, institutional and interactional context. Reflexively created self-identification requires confirmation by interaction partners. New empirical data were collected through the thematic narrative interview technique (n = 55) focused on the professional experiences of women caregivers. Data coding and analysis were conducted according to the grounded theory method. Based on an in-depth analysis of the narrative interviews, the process of becoming a caregiver in a nursery was reconstructed, which includes preparing for the role, building professional practices in the context of the nursery's concept of work and creating a professional identity. Due to the institutional framework of the process of becoming a caregiver, the results of the study are discussed in reference to the Polish ECEC context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Aims Materials and methods Results Conclusion Significance Mental health problems (MHP) are a major public health challenge. Conventional healthcare has shown limitation on reducing MHP and there is a call for offering methods beyond healthcare as well as improve access to healthcare.To explore experiences among people having MHP of (i) taking part in existential conversations in groups beyond conventional healthcare and (ii) seeking and receiving conventional healthcare.Four focus group interviews were conducted after finishing existential conversations in groups. Data was analyzed following thematic analysis.The theme Access to a community for exploration and acceptance describes communication through impressions and expressions together with others. A reflective perspective on everyday life, describes re-evaluation through reflection. Within the theme Experiences of healthcare related encounters, referring to the second aim, participants recollected feelings of disconnectedness, difficulties verbalizing MHP and dealing with rigid, standardized measures.Existential conversations in group may contribute to a more reflected doing in accordance with one’s own values as well as improved mental health literacy. Design and measures within healthcare need to explicitly address MHP and consider individual’s own preferences.This study contributes to understanding of coping with MHP in everyday life from an existential perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon and extending a growing strand of research engaging feminist new materialisms to understand women's moving bodies as more-than-human phenomena, this paper considers the pandemic as an event that initiated new expressions and contents for the fitness assemblage. Engaging a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari's writings on becoming, we examine women's physical activity practices during the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing upon object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ask: How do women's pandemic relations with spaces (home, neighborhood), others (family, pets) and matter (objects of fitness) prompt new ways of knowing their own moving bodies and the importance of physical activity in their lives? Through our affective, material, and embodied analysis, we explain how the pandemic event surfaced new lines of flight away from the dominant gendered fitness assemblage. Women's affective relations and movement encounters prompted the emergence of new forms of bodily autonomy and fitness for pleasure and connection, offering glimpses of alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing physical activity as becoming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Participating in family gatherings can provide enjoyment and quality time together as a family. However, being the primary carers, mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder may experience this phenomenon differently. The purpose of this study is to explore how available literature describes mothers' experiences of participation in family gatherings and social events with their children with autism spectrum disorder. Methods: A scoping review was used to explore available literature and identify studies describing mothers' experiences of family gatherings and social events with their children. A thematic synthesis was performed to analyse and synthesise the findings. Results: A total of 8 articles were included for review. The analysis of the included studies resulted in one central theme—Negative experiences despite strategies—and four analytical themes: Feeling fear, stress, and anxiety; Avoiding family gatherings; Enjoying less and becoming less confident; and Using strategies. Conclusion: These findings indicate that mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder experience difficulties during gatherings even when using strategies, hence limiting their participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a person-centered understanding of courage, based on the classical, organismic-relational perspective in person-centered psychology. Drawing on literature (Shakespeare) and philosophy (especially Aristotle and Tillich), it discusses both the courage to be (and become) – and to belong. It considers courage as a virtue which in its deficiency is fear but in its excess is over-confidence, and elaborates four ways of understanding and working with this therapeutically: in terms of being (in terms of regard and self-regard), process (from fixity to fluidity), encounter (with self and others), and communities (influence and impact). At a meta-perspective, the article also offers a commentary on the issue of belonging in a world of psychology and/or psychotherapy that tends to discount person-centered psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on qualitative approaches, post-qualitative is a turn of "becomings," never reached but always moving. Turning from and beyond established qualitative traditions, in the post-qualitative, we pursue the leads of St. Pierre and Lather to push qualitative boundaries and offer Langar - a Sikh cultural practice of collective cooking and consumption of a shared meal as an alternative site of knowledge creation. As part, we harness the philosophical virtues of Langar and utilise its resistive prowess to put forward a methodological footprint that turns from the qualitative yardstick of rigor-tested legitimisation of knowledge. We navigate the ontological turns to locate the post-qualitative determinants of Langar and argue for its methodological rightness that disclaim scientism-based warrantability of knowledge building and acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores embodied experiences of survivability in kidney transfer. By drawing on interviews with, and photography produced by, people on dialysis or with a kidney transplant, this paper counters biomedical approaches to survival by examining the fluid, dynamic, and shifting relations and affects of living on and with kidney transfer. Through an engagement with vitalist thinking, it is argued that kidney transfer is an ongoing process of becoming. In doing so, three characteristics of becoming in kidney transfer are identified: first, becoming in kidney transfer is characterized by material embodied experiences, which occur across and between the intersecting registers of the bodily interior, exterior, and body-in-space; second, experiences of survivability in kidney transfer are shaped through highly relational and dynamic engagements with other people, the more-than-human, and place; and third, becoming in kidney transfer involves developing new relationships to time and temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the earliest writings to which we have access introduce the myth of a human child raised by wolves. Enkidu is the "wild" friend of Gilgamesh in the eponymous Sumerian epic; Romulus and Remus of Rome are the infants who suckle from the she-wolf Lupa; and Mowgli's story has been told ever since he was conceived by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book. While this wolf story might seem to imagine a friendly way of living with other-than-human beings, its contemporary uptake in media also serves as a prop for white supremacist orientations to the myth that reassert the primacy of "human" life, while always determining who counts as human. Nature, on this stage, is a savage, dangerous backdrop against which human cruelties and violence are portrayed as the "survival of the fittest." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his book "Emotions and Storms" issued in Baghdad in 1952, the Iraqi poet Sheikh Ali al-Sharqi 1894-1964 distinguishes himself from his peers among the poets of his time, and from the poets who followed him in dealing with emotional states in their subject matter and style. The poet tries to deal with human concerns, portraying his troubled, persecuted self, who found himself imprisoned in a prison, until he became a nightmare suspended in a cage, and seemed to suffer from the theft of happiness, and live in confusion and loss. Thus, the poet continues to reveal various emotional states. In this research, an attempt is made to apply the various mechanisms and procedures adopted by the semiotics of the passions of Grimas and Fontane in their book (The Semiotics of the Passions from the States of Things to the States of the Soul, 1991). This research also benefits from the readings of J. K. Cookie in his book (The Pursuit of Meaning, 1997), and is interested in the views of Dennis Bert Arn in his book (Literary Semiotics, 2000). This research reveals the connotations carried by the passions in the poems of Al-Sharqi, showing the mechanisms of action of emotions and how to produce their meanings, as well as monitoring the extent of the influence of these emotions in the formation of different connotations. This research pays attention to emotions, ways of achieving them, and clarifying their ability to generate hidden tendencies, which constitute an entry point for identifying emotional states that the self shows before the significance is formed in the cognitive and deliberative dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Frailty' is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily presentation, with numerous scores and measures to support its clinical determination. While these tools are typically quantitative in nature and based primarily on physical capacity, qualitative research has revealed that frailty is also associated with a range of social, economic and environmental factors. Here, we progress the understanding of frailty in older people via a new materialist synthesis of recent qualitative studies of frailty and ageing. We replace a conception of frailty as a bodily attribute with a relational understanding of a 'frailty assemblage'. Within this more-than-human assemblage, materialities establish the on-going 'becoming' of the frail body. What clinicians refer to as 'frailty' is one becoming among many, produced during the daily activities and interactions of older people. Acknowledging the complexity of these more-than-human becomings is essential to make sense of frailty, and how to support and enhance the lives of frail older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In regards to the nature of time, it has become commonplace to hear physicists state that time does not exist and that the perception of time passing and of events occurring in time is an illusion. In this paper, I argue that physics is actually agnostic on the question of the nature of time. The standard arguments against its existence all suffer from implicit biases and hidden assumptions, rendering many of them circular in nature. An alternative viewpoint to that of Newtonian materialism is the process view of Whitehead. I will show that the process perspective supports the reality of becoming, of happening, and of change. At the fundamental level, time is an expression of the action of process generating the elements of reality. Metrical space–time is an emergent aspect of relations between process-generated entities. Such a view is compatible with existing physics. The situation of time in physics is reminiscent of that of the continuum hypothesis in mathematical logic. It may be an independent assumption, not provable within physics proper (though it may someday be amenable to experimental exploration). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, digital and photographic life narratives by women living with breast cancer and mastectomy have gained public visibility. This article examines how a documentary and fashion photography project in contemporary Berlin rethinks normative concepts of femininity, embodiment, and sexuality through the performance of the breast cancer patient as Amazon warrior. Based on feminist theory, disability studies, media studies, and in particular Gilles Deleuze's concept of becoming , I coin the term "becoming-Amazon" for the process of relational subjectivity formation that the project opens up. Uta Melle's project shifts notions of post-mastectomy bodies as unfeminine, incomplete, or asexual and envisions and celebrates a multiplicity of relational femininities, embodiments, and erotic zones with difference. By combining digital cancer activism and an aesthetics and politics of visibility, difference, and intercorporeality, Melle's project intervenes in contemporary cancer discourse and unsettles what has been considered as redemptive cancer culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adds to research on emerging masculinities in the Pacific by analysing how Papua New Guinean and Chinese male employees' intercultural work experiences impact their perceptions of becoming a good man. The idea of a good man acts as a benchmark for assessing the adaptability of Papua New Guinean employees to new work environments and determining if Chinese colleagues are their desired partners. I illustrate this point by first considering 'becoming' as an alternate framework to the binary framework reflected in earlier research. I next describe how Papua New Guinean workers impress their Chinese supervisors through negotiations and concessions about industrial and subsistence farming time, as well as how working with Papua New Guinean workers alters Chinese employees' perceptions of work. Finally, I demonstrate how employment practices foster Papua New Guinean workers' evolving perspectives on becoming a gutpela man ('good man') and Chinese employees' evolving perspectives on becoming a good person, a vital route to becoming a chenggong man ('successful man'). This article proposes characterizing emerging masculinities as hybrid identities that are context‐dependent, interculturally exchanged and temporal by presenting two parties' new thoughts on becoming a good man. This article demonstrates modulatory power dynamics in the Chinese refinery based on a two‐way narrative as opposed to portraying Chinese management as the dominating force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst a pandemic‐ridden world, in which esoteric practices, conspiracy theories, and alternative spiritual movements are gathering growing popularity, turning the spotlight on spirituality can be seen as a problematic move that some might feel tempted to reject outright. However, rather than reifying the belief‐driven pretensions traditionally upheld by religion, in this paper, I wish to propose a different outlook on spirituality, one which is linked to those inexplicable, visceral sensations engendered by German artist Katharina Grosse's explosive use of colour. To do this, I turn to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, who when affirming the non‐representational, spiritual potencies inherent to art provides the conceptual means through which to address such relationship. Specifically, Deleuze places the emphasis on his concept of sensation, which speaks neither of subject nor object. Indeed, by apprehending those in‐between, intensive moments in which a visual work of art stimulates our eyes, mind, and body, sensation foregrounds an immanent, and not transcendent, understanding of spirituality. This immanent understanding of spirituality refers to the pre‐individual forces and processes from the outside through which sensation enables us to precursively experience what the spiritual looks and feels like, yet without enforcing a dogmatic pathway to follow. Thus, by combining my reflections on Deleuze's thinking on sensation with creative vignettes based on an online ethnographic study of Grosse's artworks, the paper presents three methodological pointers: (1) Confronting the in‐betweenness of sensation, (2) Experimenting with the precursive force of language, and (3) Unleashing the literary power of becoming. Through them, I show how geographers might rethink their engagements with art as having more to do with an aesthetically induced, micro‐subjective journey into their spiritual becoming than with an intentional encounter. I conclude the paper by discussing the ethico‐political implications that endorsing an ethos of sensation might have for geography and beyond. Inspired by German artist Katharina Grosses explosive artworks, this paper seeks to rethink how geography and spirituality might be brought together, when taking the inexplicable, visceral sensations generated by colour as a starting point. In so doing, the paper combines my theoretical reflections on Gilles Deleuzes concept of sensation with three creative vignettes (based on an online ethnographic study of Grosses work) in order to present three spiritually informed, methodological pointers. The paper concludes by discussing the ethico‐political implications that endorsing an ethos of sensation might have for geographers engagements with the visual arts and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Qualitative inquiry teachers often seek powerful pedagogies to improve their students' understandings. Using our experience leading a doctoral workshop, we share our method for teaching narrative interviewing using Schön's (1983) "reflection-in-action," meaning teachers and students reflect in the moment. We also root our pedagogy in Jerome Bruner's (1986, 1990) narrative as a mode of thinking and a mode of being, a philosophy exploring the ways learners story their own and others' lives. Describing our doctoral workshop, we highlight Laura, a recent graduate, narrating and becoming a qualitative inquirer. We conclude with a sample teaching lesson, designed to enhance students' reflective research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author, Submissions Editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives for the past five years, surveys the several reasons he likes reading analytic writing as much as he does. He cites its usefulness as psychoanalytic companion, psychoanalytic supervisor, and midwife of an aliveness that is its own reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief tribute speaks to the profound and multiple contributions of Dr. Tami Spry to performance studies and qualitative inquiry by calling upon the poetic to make its case. It argues that Dr. Spry will have a lasting and continuing impact on her field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]