Movement and touch: Why bodies matter

What impact has social distancing, which is at its core physical distancing, had on the body and bodily practices in light of the digital society that we live in? What do established theories in the sociology of the body have to say about the societal relevance of bodies, and what kinds of eruptions and confusions have been unleashed by the COVID-19 crisis? This chapter investigates these questions, showing that the pandemic is changing the status of interaction between bodies, which is generated through orders of touch that, in turn, have led to changes in the formation of subjects. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

Moving Beyond the Frame: Flows and Relations in Hybrid Body–Screen Lifeworlds

This article employs both a written text and an artistic video encounter with the reader, to articulate human lived experience as a spatial and temporal semioscape of relations that flow across and between the inner-outer lifeworlds or Umwelten for individuals. Further, it asserts that such lifeworlds are experienced in continual and dynamic relation with nonhumans and non-life (human-devised technologies, circulations, and substances as well as planetary circulations and substances such as rock, sky, air, and so on)—an entangled and mobile situation that humans can notice and derive meaning from. Taking as its starting point a video performance-paper, Still/We noticed smallest things, created by the author, and originally presented to participants of Unruly Landscapes Colloquium in June 2020, the article will assert that immersion in a simultaneously embodied and screen-world semioscape that includes urbanwild entanglements demonstrates the human biophilic ability to attune to complex relations in hybrid bio/techno situations.

Embodied approaches to supervision: The listening body

Movement and the body are an essential aspect of supervision, whether we explicitly work with the body or not. The interest of this book is in the intentional focus on the body and movement and how this can serve the supervisory process. The book presents innovative approaches and reflective accounts of working with the body in supervision. The supervisory interventions open up new ways of seeing, listening and understanding through embodied processes. The authors, all experts in their fields, each bring a wealth of experience and knowledge, raising awareness of the value of working with the body in the supervisory relationship. The hybrid nature of the book reflects the current climate of cross-modality fertility in the world of psychotherapy. The book offers further insights into how embodiment is defined and can be attended to within supervision sessions. It presents with clarity diverse approaches to supervision practice where the body is at the center of facilitating the reflection and containment of supervisees, in both a one-to-one and a group context. In addition, each chapter contains case vignettes illustrating the application of a particular supervision model, whether working in person, online, indoors or outside or in the context of self-supervision. Taking shape in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the book emerges at a time of unprecedented challenges. So, besides reflecting on their specific approach, some contributors offer reflections on the impact of the pandemic on their practice. The ten chapters present a variety of embodied approaches to supervision rooted in a diverse range of practices including body psychotherapy, psychodrama, eco-supervision, dance movement psychotherapy, family therapy and drama therapy. This text will be of value to supervisors and supervisors-in-training, psychotherapists, practitioners seeking supervision and anyone keen to learn more about embodied approaches in supervision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Hygienic Assessment of Personal Protective Equipment against Biological Hazards

Introduction: The professional use of personal protective equipment (PPE) eliminates occupational exposure of personnel to pathogens that cause infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Apart from the risk of exposure to biological hazards, healthcare workers are at risk of impaired work performance and work-related diseases posed by adverse health effects of PPE itself. Objective: To make a physiological and hygienic assessment of personal protective equipment against biological hazards used by healthcare professionals. Materials and methods: We evaluated the thermal state of the body in 13 volunteers under simulated conditions of the Tabai temperature and humidity chamber (Japan). The study design included a physiological and hygienic assessment of four variants of protective suits, all compliant with recommendations of the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing (Rospotrebnadzor) for use when working with microorganisms of risk groups I and II. We studied the physiological response of the thermoregulatory system to heat exposures in terms of indicators characterizing the temperature of the "core”, the temperature of the "shell”, and their integral indicators (weighted mean skin and body temperatures). Changes in the fluid and electrolyte metabolism and the functional state of the cardiorespiratory system were assessed based on objective (sweat and heart rates) and subjective (heat sensation) indicators. Results: At the air temperatures of 25 and 30 °C, the maximum thermal exposure was registered in the volunteers wearing coveralls made of nonwoven material of the Tyvek type (China). A suit made of polyester fabric with a polyurethane mem-brane coating (Russia) had a less pronounced effect on the thermal state of the body. The minimum core and shell temperatures were noted for the suits made of polymer-viscose dustproof, water-repellent twill weave fabric (Russia) and Barrier 2X fabric (Russia). Conclusion: The excess of established values of the thermal state of the body during medium work was observed for all types of the studied suits both in permissible (25 °C) and harmful (30 °C) microclimate conditions. To prevent ill-being of medical personnel, it is necessary to schedule work taking into account the type of PPE used, the intensity of physical activity, and indoor microclimate parameters. © 2022, Federal Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology. All rights reserved.

Assessment of the Effect of Wearing Personal Protective Equipment of the Respiratory System on the Human Body

The article is devoted to assessing the effect of personal respiratory protective equipment on the vital activity of the human body. In the context of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the society had to take emergency measures to prevent the spread of infection, the most common of which was the massive and uncontrolled wearing of masks. This further complicated the situation of those who are prescribed to use personal protective equipment for production needs, to protect themselves from hazardous and harmful production factors. The survey revealed the number of physiological and psychological reactions to the effects of masks both during their wearing and after removal. Among the negative consequences: difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, headaches, as well as health-threatening conditions associated with disruption of the heart. A relationship was found between the presence of chronic diseases of the respiratory system in the respondents, and an increase in the number of complaints of difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, fainting and heart failure while wearing a mask. The physiological reactions of the body that occurred after the cessation of the use of personal respiratory protective equipment, especially after prolonged wearing, were analyzed. It is shown that the revealed physiological reactions, especially in chronic manifestation, negatively affect the human immunity, making it vulnerable both to hazardous and harmful production factors, as well as to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, primarily pulmonary. People with diseases of the cardiorespiratory system are at particular risk. © 2022, STC Industrial Safety CJSC. All rights reserved.

Assessment of the Effect of Wearing Personal Protective Equipment of the Respiratory System on the Human Body

The article is devoted to assessing the effect of personal respiratory protective equipment on the vital activity of the human body. In the context of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the society had to take emergency measures to prevent the spread of infection, the most common of which was the massive and uncontrolled wearing of masks. This further complicated the situation of those who are prescribed to use personal protective equipment for production needs, to protect themselves from hazardous and harmful production factors. The survey revealed the number of physiological and psychological reactions to the effects of masks both during their wearing and after removal. Among the negative consequences: difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, headaches, as well as health-threatening conditions associated with disruption of the heart. A relationship was found between the presence of chronic diseases of the respiratory system in the respondents, and an increase in the number of complaints of difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, fainting and heart failure while wearing a mask. The physiological reactions of the body that occurred after the cessation of the use of personal respiratory protective equipment, especially after prolonged wearing, were analyzed. It is shown that the revealed physiological reactions, especially in chronic manifestation, negatively affect the human immunity, making it vulnerable both to hazardous and harmful production factors, as well as to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, primarily pulmonary. People with diseases of the cardiorespiratory system are at particular risk. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]

Determination of Internal Temperature by Measuring the Temperature of the Body Surface Due to Environmental Physical Factors-First Study of Fever Screening in the COVID Pandemic.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic has shown that the use of a contact thermometer to verify the elevated body temperature of a suspected person carries a risk of spreading disease. The perfect solution seems to be the use of thermal imaging as a diagnostic method in fever evaluation. The aim of the research is to develop an algorithm for thermovision measurements in fever screening standards in the context of the impact of various weather conditions on the temperature of people entering the public institution. Each examined person had two thermal images of the face-AP and lateral projection. Using a T1020 FLIR thermal camera with a resolution of 1024 × 768 pixels; the mean temperature was measured from the area of the forehead, the maximum forehead, the corners of the eyes, the inside of the mouth and the external auditory canal temperature. On the other hand, using classic contact thermometers, the temperature in the armpit and ear was measured. The obtained preliminary results showed very strong and positive correlations between the temperature in the ear measured with an ear thermometer and the maximum, minimum and average forehead temperature. These correlations oscillate at approximately r = 0.6, but the highest value of Spearman coefficient was obtained for the mean temperature of the forehead. Moreover, high correlations were also obtained between the temperature in the ear, measured with an ear thermometer, and the maximum temperature in the corners of the eyes and in the ear, measured with a thermal imaging camera. These values were, respectively, r = 0.54, r = 0.65. In summarizing, remote body temperature measurement taken with a thermal camera can be useful in the assessment of the body's core temperature.

An Ethics of Needs: Deconstructing Neoliberal Biopolitics and Care Ethics with Derrida and Spivak

The body in need of care is the subaltern of the neoliberal epistemic order: it is that which cannot be heard, and that which is muted, partially so even in care ethics. In order to read the writing by which the needy body writes the world, a new ethics must be articulated. Building on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notions of subalternity and epistemic violence, critical disability scholarship, and corporeal care theories, in this article I develop an ethics of needs. This is an ethical position that seeks to read the world that care needs write with the relations they enact. The ethics of needs deconstructs the world with a focus on those care needs that are presently responded to with neglect, indifference, or even violence: the absence of care. Specifically, the ethics of needs opens a space—a spacing, an aporia—for a more ethical politics of life than neoliberal biopolitics can ever provide, namely, the politics of life of needs.

Arts of the Body and Dialogism in Sonnet 116: potentiality for an aesthetic education of the gaze

This article aims to reflect on the relationship between the Arts of the Body and Dialogism in the visual-verb scenic project Sonnet 116 (W. Shakespeare) - Direction Jose Roberto Jardim - with Fernanda Nobre, in 2021, in order to investigate possibilities for an aesthetic education of the gaze in contemporaneity. Immersed in the virtual sphere of production, circulation and reception of the Arts of the Body (a polysemic term that allows us to consider the adaptation of the scene to different formats and platforms radically triggered by the global pandemic of covid-19), the work presents possible discussions on foundational themes that constitute language studies today. Based on the thinking of the group of Russian intellectuals currently called Bakhtin and the Circle, the work mobilizes concepts related to the macro notion of Dialogism, on the grounds of which it focuses on its object of analysis. The results present contributions to the field of language and education studies, which are interested in the functioning of discourse in different fields, including theater and performance, as well as to the universe of the Arts of Body (wider than before), which we have been facing, for some time now, through Bakhtinian lens.

The Unheld Child: Social Work, Social Distancing and the Possibilities and Limits to Child Protection during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The recent tragic deaths in England of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and sixteen-month-old Star Hobson during the first phase of COVID-19 have raised questions about why social workers did not protect them. The introduction of social distancing due to the pandemic disrupted the ways social workers used play, talk and touch to understand children's experiences and the research we report on in this article explored how able were social workers to keep children safe and help families from a distance? We followed the work of forty-eight social work staff over the first nine months of the pandemic and found that they were creative in seeing children on video calls and outdoors, and some did get physically close to children. There were, however, significant constraints on their work. High levels of anxiety and fear of infection made it hard for them to think straight and stay focused on children on home visits, to play or even touch toys. Working from home rather than in the office cut them off from vital sources of peer and supervisory support. Better understanding of these limits will be crucial to keeping children safe for the remainder of the pandemic and beyond it. The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such perspective has become more important than ever due to knowledge of children who died tragically from abuse despite social work involvement during the pandemic. Our research findings show how some practitioners got physically close to some children, whilst being distanced from others. We examine the dynamics that shaped closeness and distance and identify seven influences that created limits to child protection and the problem of 'the unheld child'. The article provides new understandings of child protection as embodied, multi-sensorial practices and the ways anxiety and experiences of bodily self-alienation limit practitioners' capacities to think about and get close to children. Whilst social workers creatively improvised to achieve their goals, coronavirus and social distancing imposed limits to child protection that no amount of innovative practice could overcome in all cases.

ASSESSING FUNCTIONAL STATE OF THE BODY WHEN WEARING A REUSABLE PROTECTIVE SUIT TO MINIMIZE RISKS OF CONTAGION AMONG MEDICAL PERSONNEL

Personal protective equipment has become the last line of protection for medical personnel during the pandemic of thenew coronavirus infection since it allows minimizing risks of biological contagion. Given the existing staffing shortage,medical wo rkers have to spend from 4 to 12 hours a day in the “red zone” where they necessarily wear personal protectiveequipment. Protective clothing is known to produce negative effects on functional state of the body and personnel’s workingcapacities. Assessment of up-to-date protective suits will allow developing recommendations on their suitable applicationbearing in mind a balance between necessary protection, providing favorable ergonomics, and reducing risks of adverseeffects on functional state and working capacities.Our research aim was to hygienically assess health risks for medical workers who had to wear reusable protective suits.Our research object was a reusable suit made from polyether fabric with polyurethane membrane coating and antistaticthreads. We performed an experiment aimed at evaluating thermal state of the body, psychophysiological state, and responsesby the volunteers’ cardiorespiratory system in laboratory conditions during an 8 hour working shift under controlledmicroclimate. Participants in the experiment were questioned in order to assess suits’ ergonomics.Heat exchange dynamics and amount of changes in thermal physiological parameters caused by wearing a protectivesuit determined heat contents of volunteers’ bodies that conformed to optimal standard values. Data on psychophysiologicaland mental state taken in research dynamics didn’t have any statistically significant changes. Gas exchange indicators naturallygrew during the “load” phase;however, there were no significant changes detected in any phase in the research.Hygienic assessment of the thermal state, functional state of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and psychophysiologicalindicators confirmed that wearing a protective suit was quite safe and didn’t involve any health risks for volunteers. © 2021,Health Risk Analysis. All Rights Reserved.

Toward healthier futures in post-pandemic times: Political ecology, racial capitalism, and black feminist approaches to care

The COVID-19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature-political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care-to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, enabling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular processes, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the uprisings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships.

[Prospects of drinking mineral water in the rehabilitation of patients with coronavirus (COVID-19) infection: analysis of the main sanogenetic mechanisms]. / Perspektivy primeneniya pit'evykh mineral'nykh vod v reabilitatsii patsientov s koronavirusnoi (COVID-19) infektsiei: analiz osnovnykh sanogeneticheskikh mekhanizmov.

This review provides an analysis of the main mechanisms of the therapeutic and prophylactic effects of drinking mineral water concerning the rehabilitation of new coronavirus infection convalescents. When considering the sanogenetic potential of mineral water for drinking, it was noted that in the mechanisms of their systemic effects, a major role belongs to the nonspecific hormone-stimulating effect in the form of a pronounced activation of the gastroenteropancreatic endocrine system, capable of integrating substance and energy exchange following the current needs of the body and excrete vasoactive factors modulating the vital functional systems activity. The maximum effect of this system is promoted by the intake of mineral water with a high content of hydrocarbonate ions, magnesium, and sodium, as well as carbon dioxide saturation, but with general mineralization of water within the range from 5-6 to 11-13 g/L. The observed stimulating effect of mineral water on the adaptation processes allowed us to theoretically substantiate and convincingly prove the benefits of using this natural healing factor for the primary prevention of disorders in various functional systems and their hormonal regulation. The effects of drinking mineral water on various inflammatory states, resistance to hypoxia, microcirculatory tissue perfusion, and the state of the cardiovascular system were shown. It is concluded that the potential effectiveness of drinking mineral water as a part of comprehensive programs of medical rehabilitation of new coronavirus infection convalescents.

"Somatics of early Buddhist mindfulness and how to face anxiety": Correction

Reports in an error in "Somatics of early Buddhist mindfulness and how to face anxiety" by Analayo Bhikku (Mindfulness, 2020[May], Vol 11[6], 1520-1526 ). The author decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to © The Author(s) 2021 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. (The following is from the original article that appeared in (see record 2020-31995-001). The body is a central object of the cultivation of mindfulness, in the way this has been described in relevant Pali discourses and their parallels. At the background of such cultivation stands the absence of positing a mind-body duality and a lack of concern with a particular physical location of the mind in early Buddhist thought. Moreover, the various exercises that involve directing mindfulness to the body need to be considered in conjunction in order to arrive at a balanced understanding of their overarching purpose. Out of the different possible modalities of cultivating mindfulness in this way, the discourses present awareness directed to one's own bodily postures as a practice already undertaken by the Buddha-to-be when he was still in quest of awakening. In this particular setting, such mindfulness of postures served as a way of facing fear. The potential of this exercise to provide a grounding in embodied mindfulness, being fully in the here and now, is of particular relevance to the challenges posed by the current pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

Bound by Infinities: Technology, Immediacy and Our Environmental Crisis.

This paper explores the relationship between human desire, technology, and imagination, emphasizing (1) the phenomenology of this relationship, and (2) its ontological and ecological ramifications. Drawing on the work of Bion and Winnicott, the paper will develop a psychoanalytic container for attitudes contributing to our current climate-based crisis, paying special attention to the problematic effect technology has had on our sense of time and place. Many of our technologies stunt sensuous engagement, collapse psychic space, diminish our capacity to tolerate frustration, and blind us to our dependence on worlds beyond the human. In short, our technologies trouble our relationship to our bodies and other bodies. The paper argues that omnipotent fantasies organizing our relationship to technology, to each other, and to the nonhuman world, have cocooned us in a kind of virtual reality that devastates a sense of deep obligation to the environment.

Changes in Body Mass and Composition of the Body as Well as Physical Activity and Time Spent in Front of the Monitor by Students of the Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences during the Period of COVID-19 Restrictions.

The aim of the study is to assess the impact of changes in daily physical activity during the blockade (March 2020-February 2021) on the mass and segmental composition of the body of young people. Material and research methods: In total, 120 people from the sports and medical university aged 19.8 (±0.8) years, average height 173.2 (±9.2) cm, body mass 66.1 (±12.8), and BMI 19.2 (±5.9) kg/m2. The research was carried out in two stages. The total and segmental body mass of the respondents and the change in physical activity during the pandemic were assessed twice (December 2019, February 2021). There was a statistically significant increase in body mass in men, an increase in total fat mass in women, and statistically significant changes in the distribution of fat mass in both sexes. Conclusions: In the studied group, there was a change in the forms of physical activity from strength and group activity to endurance activity (running forms, cycling.) and individual activity. The subjects showed a statistically significant increase in body fat, regardless of gender, and in the upper limbs in men.

Risk perception, coronavirus and precariousness. A reflection on fieldwork under quarantine.

On 19 March 2020, I last met with a group of women from a neighbourhood of Monterrey, Mexico where I have spent the past year conducting ethnographic research. They had scheduled a meeting to decide whether to continue our weekly talks on health-related topics. 'Is this coronavirus real?' was the question guiding the meeting. Women shared their thoughts on their feelings on the threat that predominates in biomedical discourse. An air of resignation pervaded their speech. Nearly all of them suffer from chronic diseases and they clearly perceive the risk of their own death. However, the material conditions of their lives limit the scope of their strategies to protect themselves. A dialogue emerged between the women's request for clarity regarding the pandemic and me, a researcher called on as a physician. This article seeks to reflect on the political and moral aspects of everyday life that configure risk perception in the context of the WHO-declared pandemic. I analyse the dialogue sustained in the meeting as part of an ethnographic research I am conducting in this neighbourhood. Most of its residents live under precarious circumstances, which is a fundamental element in understanding their responses to the current COVID-19 crisis.

Somatics of Early Buddhist Mindfulness and How to Face Anxiety.

The body is a central object of the cultivation of mindfulness, in the way this has been described in relevant Pali discourses and their parallels. At the background of such cultivation stands the absence of positing a mind-body duality and a lack of concern with a particular physical location of the mind in early Buddhist thought. Moreover, the various exercises that involve directing mindfulness to the body need to be considered in conjunction in order to arrive at a balanced understanding of their overarching purpose. Out of the different possible modalities of cultivating mindfulness in this way, the discourses present awareness directed to one's own bodily postures as a practice already undertaken by the Buddha-to-be when he was still in quest of awakening. In this particular setting, such mindfulness of postures served as a way of facing fear. The potential of this exercise to provide a grounding in embodied mindfulness, being fully in the here and now, is of particular relevance to the challenges posed by the current pandemic.