Browsing by Subject "Embodiment"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Open Access
    Peace, love and hope: a rural farm dwelling and labouring community's embodied knowledge of wellness and repair in an environment that continues to harm
    (2025) Conradie, Une; Levine, Susan
    Farm labouring and dwelling communities are considered among the most vulnerable populations in South Africa. The vast majority of health and wellness studies in these communities focus on the harmful social, psychological and biological impacts of historical, structural and institutional violence. What has not received sufficient attention is how farm labouring and dwelling communities resist the impacts of ongoing violence. This multimodal study engaged twenty-six participants living and working in a small rural farming community in the Cederberge in an arts-based research process to explore their embodied knowledge of wellness and repair in an environment that continues to harm. The arts-based research process was rooted in Victor Turners' adaptation of liminality to facilitate the co-creation of a research space where the research participants could be both the observers and the observed. What emerged from the participants' artworks, stories, and reflections was their insights and wisdom into wellness and repair, which mirrors contemporary discussions in Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience and the Applied Arts. The research participants portrayed wellness as inseparable from their relationships, emphasising their ability to communicate as a connected and loving community as the foundation for wellness. Embodied love also played a central role in how the research participants portrayed their capacity for daily repair in an environment that causes daily ruptures. By layering the research participants' art, stories and reflections with an interdisciplinary exploration of trauma, the study highlights the importance of being witnessed and bearing witness to moments of resistance and connection to build a collective capacity for repair in an environment that continues to harm.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    The Embodied needs of Women in the Workplace: An Exploratory study
    (2021) Chimhandamba, Nyasha Aura; Swart-Opperman, Christina
    Women and men face differences in how they experience the work environment concerning health and safety and their needs within the workspace. Depending on age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, women and men face different stigmas, thus impacting their difficulties within their work environments. Owing to this knowledge, the purpose of this research was to explore this difference in the workplace and understand how women experience the workplace differently. Specifically, from a perspective of embodiment and the needs, women are often inclined to have as a result of biology in the workplace. This insightful study explored the personalisation of embodiment by examining the diversified understanding of embodied needs of women that existed within different levels of an organisational hierarchy and had varied roles that required different levels of skills, manual labour, and knowledge. Using qualitative interviews and a phenomenological approach, the realities of these women with different embodied needs, and embodied stages were explored. The central insight being that while women may suffer the same injustices in the workplace and share the same biology, their embodied needs and experience still vary and cannot be painted with the same brush. Through this qualitative insight, key themes such as pregnancy and maternal needs, workplace accommodations, women clinic services and women workplace accommodations were identified as components of the female embodied needs. This exploratory study brought light to this understanding by exploring the varied experience of 12 participants.