Through the Magical Pink Walkway: A Behavior Setting’s Invitation to Embodied Sense-Makers

Abstract

This paper examines an intersection between ecological psychology and the enactive approach brought about by studying sense-making in relation to a behavior setting in Hong Kong and adopting a focus on embodied action and gesture. A cosmetics pop-up store embedded in a downtown shopping mall provides the basis for a case study involving a two-pronged analysis. I first use Barker's behavior setting theory to describe the publicly accessible structure and dynamics of the store, which reveals a bounded spatiotemporal entity with several interdependent behavior-milieu parts. I then analyze video recordings of my research participant encountering, entering, and exploring this environment. Following an enactive-informed micro-ethnographic approach to embodied communication, I examine her movements, postures, gestures, and language use as she joins the behavior setting. These fine-grained descriptions of her embodied actions provide an empirical basis to analyze enactive sense-making. On the one hand, they disclose the affective and emotional experience of perceiving relevant affordances in the environment, and on the other hand, they show the specificity of sensorimotor abilities required to join the setting's standing pattern of behavior.

Reclaiming behaviour settings: reviewing empirical applications of Barker’s behaviour settings theory

“…Of these 103 empirical papers, we found only three [80][81][82] that mentioned Barker's K-21 test of interdependence. It is possible that some researchers may have used the test without naming it (for instance Harrison [83]); however, because so few researchers explained their method in replicable detail, we cannot include them in this count.…”

“…Within this group, one paper did not focus on behaviour settings. Some highlights include asking whether behaviour settings are detectable through joint patterns of action without a visible environment [116], presenting a shortened version of the lengthy behaviour settings survey method [117], determining whether behaviour settings have phenotypes [82] or a structural taxonomy [118,119], and investigating the way that behaviour settings can shed light on individual sense-making behaviours [83]. Carvalho et al [23] suggest that behaviour settings theory can be used to identify environmental constraints in sport (here tennis) in a way that can offer principled guidance for coaches designing practice sessions.…”

Navigating the normativity of behaviour settings: an observational case study

“…A behaviour setting comprises one or more recurring patterns of behaviour interlocked with certain material arrangements, for example, objects, materials and spatial configurations, which, in Barker's terminology, are collectively referred to as 'milieu'. The 'essential fittingness' [9] between the milieu and the patterns of behaviour gives rise to 'synomorphic' relations, meaning that there is a tight reciprocity between the activities and the environment that constitutes the behaviour setting over time [9,12]. Thus, within a behaviour setting, activities are organized around functional units known as 'synomorphs', which we understand as places of action.…”

“…Recent developments in behaviour setting research foreground the temporal, dynamical, and historical dimensions of the behaviour setting, reconceptualizing them as self-generated and emergent from the confluence of multiple, reciprocal influences [12][13][14][15][16]. Instead of assuming that situational norms are pre-programmed, we build on this literature and explore how the normative specificity within a behaviour setting is performed.…”

Dancing K-Pop with Chinese and “English in Class Please”: Policy Negotiations as Relational-Languaging Episodes

“…As we know from two decades of Second Language Acquisition research, language-related episodes open up critical moments for negotiating linguistic knowledge and meaning in classroom discourse (Edstrom, 2015; Leeser, 2004; Ohta, 2001; Williams, 1999). From our psychogeographic and ecological-enactive perspectives (Fleming and Harrison, 2020; Harrison, 2020), we see student group interactions as meshworks or knottings of “entangled lines of life, growth and movement” (Ingold, 2011: 63). In the EMI classroom, language policy negotiation is interlaced through such knottings and may tighten or loosen depending on the situation.…”