Key research themes
1. How does embodied cognition inform meaning-making through bodily experience and interaction?
This theme explores the role of the body as intrinsic to cognition and meaning-making, emphasizing how bodily experience, sensorimotor engagement, and the environment shape thought, learning, self, and social interaction. It highlights the inseparability of body and mind in cognitive processes, addressing the theoretical and empirical significance of embodiment for understanding language, communication, and identity construction.
2. What methodological frameworks and design principles operationalize embodied meaning-making in qualitative research and technological interfaces?
This theme investigates how embodied theory informs methodological practices in qualitative research and design, focusing on how to capture, analyze, and design for embodied experience and meaning-making. It covers embodied qualitative methodologies that grapple with representing sensorial and affective bodily experience, and design principles that support embodied sensemaking in technology-mediated interactions, highlighting the challenges and strategies for integrating embodiment into research and design processes.
3. How does embodiment shape self-constitution, imagination, and the experience of temporality in meaning-making processes?
This theme investigates the interrelations between embodiment and subjectivity in constituting selfhood, imagination, and temporal experience. It focuses on phenomenological accounts of how bodily experience underpins narrative self-construction, the limits of embodied imagination in adopting other perspectives, and the twofold temporality inherent in embodied intentionality—distinguishing between the lived body and the body as object—thereby elucidating embodiment’s role in shaping meaning across self and time.