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The purpose of this paper is to outline research which aimed to explore psychotherapists’ experience of working with despair, in the UK prison setting, through a qualitative phenomenological approach. Within the forensic psychological literature, despair is considered a pathology, associated with suicide and self-harm, resulting from the prisoners histories and the coercive prison setting. In turn, therapeutic writings outline the importance of therapy in the prison setting with despair in providing coping skills, containment and learning opportunities for the prisoners involved.

Within the study, ten psychotherapists were interviewed as to their experience of working with clients in despair in the prison setting. The data were analysed via the phenomenological research method Empirical Phenomenological Analysis (EPA), and a secondary analysis through reverie.

Through the analysis by EPA, despair emerged in the prison setting as a destabilising phenomenon to which there was no protocol for working with it. Participants also described the prisoners’ despair and the despairing prison setting, touching on their own sense of vulnerability and despair. However, drawing on the secondary analysis by reverie, the researcher also became aware of how the phenomenon of despair emerged not simply through the said, but also through the intersubjective.

It was therefore through the secondary analysis by reverie that the importance of the attendance to aspects of intersubjectivity in prison research emerged. This paper contributes to the therapeutic writings on despair in the prison setting, alongside holding implications for qualitative research in the prison setting.

This chapter is an autoethnographic account of my journey from a working-class childhood and youth to becoming an academic in a large UK university. Using the techniques of poetics (Bachelard, 2004), the chapter focuses on several pivotal periods in my life, where I encountered a sequence of events that were to influence my journey towards transformation. Back in my early 20s, I knew that I wanted to change and to grow in new directions; however, infused with a particular heritage, set of experiences and cultural values – none of which embraced, recognised or understood learning and university as a possibility – I struggled to make sense of my feelings of frustration and being stranded. This is where my strange fascination with the airport, music, daydream and the notion of flight emerged (see Bachelard, 2011; Seres, 1993). Here, the nebulous and seemingly futile ache for an alternative and better future emerged as a potent hope and journey towards transition.

When Yeats wrote Reveries over Childhood and Youth in 1914 he dedicated the book to “those few people, mainly personal friends who have read all that I have written.”

This account of a field experience is written in the form of a reverie, to match the conditions that gave rise to it. It emerges from my long-term study of the Burning Man festival, a massive countercultural communal celebration of aesthetic immediacy held annually in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Marked by the suspension of ordinary commerce in favor of a gift economy, the spectacle culminates in the torching of an enormous effigy. This experimental ethnography follows in the symbolic interactionist tradition of an earlier tale told by Andrea Fontana.11Fontana, Andrea (2001), “Salt Fever: An Ethnographic Narrative in Four Sections,” Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 24: 147–163.“Urethral awakening dream.”

Twenty years ago, Hindy Schachter (1989) posed a question about the foundation we use to structure the Public Administration theory narrative. Would an approach based on an art model, rather than the more common science model, produce a narrative with less distortion? This essay employs a definition of modernism developed by Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook outside the purview of public administration and a famous M. C. Escher lithograph as a basis for proposing an alternate way to construct the narrative. It then applies the alternative approach to Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo.

This is a two-voice autoethnographic dialogue about Rousseau's Confessions and their relevance for the contemporary autoethnograpy. The paper examines the possibility that Rousseau was not only the creator of modern autobiography but also a forerunner of autoethnography. Many features of the Rousseau's masterpiece are analyzed and systematically compared to our contemporary autoethnographic sensibility: the purposes which brought him to write an outstandingly detailed description of his life; the fact that he acknowledges autobiography as the only source of true knowledge; his obsession for sincerity and his strong will to disclose all the truth about his own life to his readers (included the dreadful things that he did); the authority that he assigned to the readers in deciding about the truthfulness of his tale; his concern for the ethical issues and the care of the others; and the therapeutic value that he recognized to the practice of writing about themselves. In the end, Jean-Jacques was not only extraordinarily able to use his emotions to analyze human nature, but also he was a radical autobiographer at the limits of intransigence. His considerations on the value of autobiography can help us greatly to legitimize contemporary autoethnographic practice.

The purpose of this paper is to present a theory that applies Miller et al.’s (1960) Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) concept to the psychophysiology involved in electroencephalographic (EEG) biofeedback (BFB).

Six components are presented, namely, the teleological brain, attractors as the “test” in TOTEs, EEG production, positive and negative feedback, synaptogenesis and designated actor, and then integrated into a theoretical structure. Comparisons with the previous conceptualizations are discussed, and finally, suggestions for practical application and needed research are offered.

Previous theories neglected significant variables and promoted unverified conceptualizations. These issues are redressed with a psychophysiological, cybernetic theory.

The pursuit of substantive research needed to verify the theory would improve the scientific foundations for EEG BFB.

This theory shifts the designated actor in BFB to the participant’s brain, away from the BFB provider. EEG BFB is thus viewed as a means for neuronominalization driven by the brain’s attractor systems instead of as an intrusive intervention.

The theory proposes a much more participant-centric process than previous modes, which also promotes self-determination. The research validation needed for the theory could produce wider EEG BFB acceptance and application.

The theory is a complete departure from previous conceptualizations. It is the first instance of TOTE application to psychophysiological processes, and it is the first fully cybernetic conceptualization of EEG BFB.

The utterly un-nostalgic person is probably a non-existent being. At both a personal and collective level, we explore how nostalgia is experienced and in demand during times of transition, disjuncture, conflict and uncertainty. This chapter explores the emotion of nostalgia and connects it specifically to the current corona pandemic – the challenges of lockdowns and social distancing measures on interaction, feelings of loneliness and a generalised sense of uncertainty and despair, and also a rise of nostalgia as a possible response to these challenges. The predominant view of nostalgia put forth in this chapter is that nostalgia has the capacity to provide a great deal of benefit (meaning, hope, direction and purpose) to individuals, groups, institutions and societies at large. Indeed, nostalgia can be a tranquil feeling in a fearful world. We relate nostalgia to studies and experiences from the pandemic period and speculate on how the so-called ‘corona crisis’ may impact feelings of nostalgia in the post-pandemic world – perhaps even a nostalgia and longing for the pandemic period itself.

If the corona pandemic has in fact sparked a new (or renewed) interest in nostalgia in contemporary society due to the corona pandemic, it may indeed prove to be a positive thing, particularly if it makes it easier for people to deal with current feelings of adversity and anxiety. We suggest the nostalgia mood that is generated and perpetuated by the continuing twists and turns of the corona pandemic may – in the short and long run – prove useful in coping with and giving meaning to the problems and perplexing circumstances of life, rather than being a regressive phenomenon. Perhaps, something good may, in the end, grow from something bad?

This paper aims to trace the tectonic effects of openings as Heideggerian “built-things”.

This study has been organized in two phases. The first phase attempts to set up the theoretical framework through exploring the links between Heidegger’s notion of “built-thing” and contemporary tectonic discourses on dialectics between the values of matheme (construction, technology) and poetics (representation, meaning) to identify the key indicators in tectonic effects of openings. Accordingly, as the term “tectonic effects” is concerned with feelings and emotions that tectonics may evoke in people, the author searches for the indicators based on the poetic aspects of tectonic values and applies them within the phenomenological method implemented in the second phase of the research to explore the indicators in the designated case of the “Çavuşoğlu house”.

The results of this study indicate the significance of ontological nexus between tectonics as “poetic revealing” and the ability of the “built-thing” to generate tectonic effects within the embodied experience of dwellers. In fact, an opening can generate ontological tectonic effects in space only if it is brought about through a truthful build-dwell process which responds in a poetic way to the daily-life needs of the dwellers. The tangible examples of this fact are evident in the openings of the Çavuşoğlu house.

The theory of tectonics of openings as a separate “built-thing”, which is put forward in the present study, is a subject that has not been sufficiently studied so far and has the potential to be developed through further research. In light of this, the theoretical results of this study can contribute to tectonic thinking during the design process.