Embodied Progress

This new edition of Sarah Franklin’s classic monograph on the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) includes two entirely new chapters reflecting on the relevance of the book’s findings in the context of the past two decades and providing a ‘state-of-the-art’ review of the field today. Over the past 25 years, both the assisted conception industry and the academic field of reproductive studies have grown enormously. IVF, in particular, is belatedly becoming recognised as one of the most influential technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a far-reaching set of implications that have to date been underestimated, understudied and under-reported. This pioneering text was the first to explore the emergence of commercial IVF in the United Kingdom, where the technique was originally developed. During the 1980s, the British Parliament devised a unique system of comprehensive national regulation of assisted reproduction amidst fractious public and media debate over IVF and embryo research. Franklin chronicles these developments and explores their significance in relation to classic anthropological debates about the meanings of kinship, gender and the 'biological facts' of parenthood. Drawing on extensive personal interviews with women and couples undergoing IVF, as well as ethnographic fieldword in early IVF clinics, the book explores the unique demands of the IVF technique. In richly detailed chapters, it documents the ‘topsy-turvy’ world of IVF, and how the experience of undergoing IVF changes its users in ways they had not anticipated. Franklin argues that such experiences reveal a crucial feature of translational biomedical procedures more widely – namely, that these are ‘hope technologies’ that paradoxically generate new uncertainties and risks in the very space of their supposed resolution. The final chapter closely engages with the ‘hope technology’ concept, as well as the idea of ‘having to try’ and uses these frames to link contemporary reproductive studies to core sociological and anthropological arguments about economy, society and technology. In the context of rapid fertility decline and huge growth in the fertility industry, this volume is even more relevant today than when it was first published at the dawn of what Franklin calls the era of 'iFertility'. Embodied Progress is an essential read for all social science academics and students with an interested in the burgeoning new field of reproductive studies. It is also a valuable resource for practitioners working in the fields of reproductive health, biomedicine and policy.

New reproductive technologies, such as in vitrio fertilization, have been the subject of intense public discussion and debate worldwide. In addition to difficult ethical, moral, personal and political questions, new technologies of assisted conception also raise novel socio-cultural dilemmas. How are parenthood, kinship and procreation being redefined in the context of new reproductive technologies? Has reproductive choice become part of consumer culture? Embodied Progress offers a unique perspective on these and other cultural dimensions of assisted conception techniques. Based on ethnographic research in Britain, this study foregrounds the experiences of women and couples who undergo IVF, whilst also asking how such experiences may be variously understood.

A systematic look at the role of “gut feelings” in psychotherapy. What actually happens in psychotherapy, outside the confines of therapeutic models and techniques? How can clinicians learn to pick up on interpersonal nuance, using their intuition to bridge the gap between theory and practice? Drawing from 30 years of clinical experience, Marks-Tarlow explores the central—yet neglected—topic of intuition in psychotherapy, sharing clinical insights and intuitions that can help transform traumatized brains into healthy minds. Bridging art and science, Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy is grounded in interpersonal neurobiology, and filled with rich case vignettes, personal stories, and original artwork. In the early chapters of the book, Marks-Tarlow defines clinical intuition as a right-brain, fully embodied mode of perceiving, relating, and responding to the ongoing flows and changing dynamics of psychotherapy. She examines how the body “has a mind of its own” in the form of implicit processes, uncovering the implicit roots of clinical intuition within human empathy and emphasizing the importance of play to clinical intuition. Encouraging therapists to bring their own unique senses of humor to clinical practice, she explains how the creative neural powers of playfulness, embedded within sensitive clinical dialogs, can move clients’ lives toward lasting positive affective growth. Later chapters explore the play of imagination within clinical intuition, where imagery and metaphor can lead to deeper insight about underlying emotions and relational truths than words alone; the developmental foundations for intuition; and clinical intuition as a vehicle for developing and expressing wisdom. At the close of each chapter, reflective exercises help the reader personally integrate the concepts. Part of the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology, this wonderful guidebook will help clinicians harness the power of spontaneous intuitive thinking to transform their therapeutic practices.

This is the first book dedicated to the study of the complexities that arise in embodied interaction from the multiplicity of time-scales on which its component processes unfold. It shows in microscopic detail how people synchronize and sequence modal resources such as talk, gaze, gesture, and object-manipulation to accomplish social actions. The studies show that each of these resources has its own temporal trajectory, affordances and restrictions, which enable and constrain the fine-grained work of bodily self-organization and interaction with others. Focusing on extended interactional time scales, some of the contributors investigate ways in which larger interactional episodes and relationships between actions are brought about and how actions build on shared interactional histories. The book makes a strong case for the use of video in the study of social interaction. It proposes an enlarged vision of Conversation Analysis that puts the body and its interactive temporalities center stage.

In this book we open our insights in the Theory of the Firm, obtained through the application of Optimal Control Theory, to a public of scholars and advanced students in economics and applied mathematics. We walk on the micro economic side of the street that is bordered by Theory of the Firm on one side and by Optimal Control Theory on the other, keeping the reader away from all the dead end roads we turned down during our 10 years lasting research. We focus attention on the expressiveness and variety of insights that are obtained through studying only simple models of the firm. In this book mathematics is our tool, insight in optimal corporate policy our goal. Therefore most of the mathematics and calculations is put into appendices and in the main text all attention is on modelling corporate behaviour and on analysing the results of the calculations. So, the main text focusses on micro economics, even more specific: on Theory of the Firm. In that way this book is contrasted from such famous text books in applied Optimal Control with a much broader portfolio of applications, like Feichtinger & Hartl (1986) or with a more rigorous introduction into theory, like Seierstad & Sydsaeter (1987).

Originating from a Dagstuhl seminar, the collection of papers presented in this book constitutes on the one hand a representative state-of-the-art survey of embodied artificial intelligence, and on the other hand the papers identify the important research trends and directions in the field. Following an introductory overview, the 23 papers are organized into topical sections on - philosophical and conceptual issues - information, dynamics, and morphology - principles of embodiment for real-world applications - developmental approaches - artificial evolution and self-reconfiguration

Until the Chace Act in 1891, no international copyright law existed between Britain and the United States, which meant publishers were free to edit text, excerpt whole passages, add new illustrations, and substantially redesign a book's appearance. In spite of this ongoing process of transatlantic transformation of texts, the metaphor of the book as a physical embodiment of its author persisted. Jessica DeSpain's study of this period of textual instability examines how the physical book acted as a major form of cultural exchange between Britain and the United States that called attention to volatile texts and the identities they manifested. Focusing on four influential works”Charles Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation, Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas”DeSpain shows that for authors, readers, and publishers struggling with the unpredictability of the textual body, the physical book and the physical body became interchangeable metaphors of flux. At the same time, discourses of destabilized bodies inflected issues essential to transatlantic culture, including class, gender, religion, and slavery, while the practice of reprinting challenged the concepts of individual identity, personal property, and national identity.