No abstract

IntroductionThis chapter describes the shades and composites of health communication in the Russian Federation, which could be called a procedural block of health knowledge production, because the term "health communication," which was invented in the Western parts of the globe, is barely compatible with Russian realities. In Russia (as in any organized human structure, from a tribe to a sophisticated nation-state), Carol Hanisch's (2000) "the personal is the political" did not spare such an intimate and emotional topic as health. Both in its biological and social meanings, health, despite arduous attempts to assign it individual properties, is comprised of state regulations, international economic structures, business strategies, ontological norms, social and cultural institutions, popular myths, and communication,. Therefore, the manner in which we communicate health reveals quite a bit about our histories, realities, discourses, and ways of knowing. This chapter portrays how health is produced and communicated in contemporary Russia, by questioning its relation to the dominant health communication discourse; by tracing the transformations of health economics models; and, finally, by presenting an infrastructure of what could be characterized as down-to-top "health communication" in Russia. When it comes to health, who is the communicator?Health has gone global. And so have health communication objectives, scholarship, and practice-although "global" here means an attempt to translate models that were created in the developed Western countries into the contexts in which health communication is not recognized by the financial support-giving bodies. The search for epistemological status and disciplinary identities of health communication (Hannawa et al., 2015) questions the nature of research objects and interdisciplinary links. Health communication can be characterized as a system of human interactions, both face-to-face and mediated, within a health-related context. The practices of health communication have been linked to the emergence and reinforcement of social structures and to the production and reproduction of the social meanings of health, illness, and disease. These practices expose and articulate the relationship among biomedical objectives, sociocultural contexts, material and symbolic productions, and internal subjective sense-making in health-related contexts (Banks & Riley, 1993;Sharf & Vanderford, 2003). However, health communication has been primarily explored on the basis of those nation-states that have the financial and institutional support for its research and industry implementation (Parrish-Sprowl, 2009). Russia is not be present in this list (the reasons will be discussed in this chapter).Therefore, following Craig's (1999) argument that communication constitutes a practical theory or, in other words, a discursive theoretical field evoking from praxis and contributing back to the practical discourse, I propose that the situation in Russia is an opening window for critically interrogating t...

This article – grounded in ethnographic fieldwork within the organization of chronic patients with multiple sclerosis in Russia – empiricizes and problematizes the work it takes to craft ethnographic collaborations with care. We attend to the notion of collaboration ‘from a body’, or, rather, from bodies-in-movement. By scrutinizing three turning points of our ethnographic fieldwork along with our relations with partners in the field, we specify how movement matters in ethnographic collaborations. Attention to the embodiment work allows us to specify the energy and resources such collaborations ask for and that are otherwise silenced or neglected. We distinguish three instances of embodiment work in such collaborations – composition, moving with and being moved by, as well as pausing. By attending to how ‘we know’ through crafting and maintaining ethnographic collaborations, this article contributes to a broader question of how to care for differences in ethnographic collaborations.

No abstract

In this article we explore an epistemic approach we name dis/embodiment and introduce “Articulations,” an interdisciplinary project bringing together Virtual Reality (VR) designers, cognitive scientists, dancers, anthropologists, and human–machine interaction specialists. According to Erin Manning, our sense of self and other emerges from processes of bodying and relational movement (becoming oneself by moving in relation with the world). The aim of the project is to exploit the potential of multi-person VR in order to explore the intersubjective dynamics of relational movement and bodying, and to do so with scientific, artistic and therapeutic purposes in mind. To achieve this bridge, we bring up a novel paradigm we name “Shared Diminished Reality”. It consists in using minimalist representation to instantiate users’ bodies in the virtual space. Instead of using humanoid avatars or full body skeletons, we reduce the representation of the moving bodies to three spheres whose trajectories reflect the tracking of the head and the two wrists. This “diminished”virtual rendition of the body-in-movement, we call dis/embodiment. It provides a simple but clear experience of one’s own responsive movement in relation to the world and other bodies. It also allows for subtle manipulations of bodies’ perceptual and cross-perceptual feedback and simplifies the tracking and the analysis of movements. After having introduced the epistemic framework, the basic architecture, and the empirical method informing the installation, we present and discuss, as a proof-of-concept, some data collected in a situated experiment at a science-art event. We investigate motion patterns observed in different experimental conditions (in which participants either could or could not see the representation of their own hands in the virtual space) and their relation with subjective reports collected. We conclude with reflection on further possibilities of our installation in exploring bodying and relational movement.