Focusing My Gaze

A revelatory account of the brain's capacity for change When neuroscientist Susan Barry was fifty years old, she experienced the sense of immersion in a three dimensional world for the first time. Skyscrapers on street corners appeared to loom out toward her like the bows of giant ships. Tree branches projected upward and outward, enclosing and commanding palpable volumes of space. Leaves created intricate mosaics in 3D. Barry had been cross-eyed and stereoblind since early infancy. After half a century of perceiving her surroundings as flat and compressed, on that day she saw the city of Manhattan in stereo depth for first time in her life. As a neuroscientist, she understood just how extraordinary this transformation was, not only for herself but for the scientific understanding of the human brain. Scientists have long believed that the brain is malleable only during a "critical period" in early childhood. According to this theory, Barry's brain had organized itself when she was a baby to avoid double vision - and there was no way to rewire it as an adult. But Barry found an optometrist who prescribed a little-known program of vision therapy; after intensive training, Barry was ultimately able to accomplish what other scientists and even she herself had once considered impossible. Dubbed "Stereo Sue" by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, Susan Barry tells her own remarkable journey and celebrates the joyous pleasure of our senses.

An endless enemy… Danger stalks their dreams… Has their god failed? Rosteval and his forces are at the limit of their endurance, fighting a hopeless war against the ever-reincarnating hordes of an endless enemy. When a foreign god seizes control of a potent weapon, Rosteval faces a choice between domination and destruction… even as a terrifying new danger stalks him and his beloved Ghaitta in their dreams. As enemies and rivals close in from every quarter, Rosteval, Ghaitta, and their friends face the greatest uncertainty of all: has their god failed them? Dark secrets, dangerous foes, and demanding gods stalk Rosteval’s path in The Shadow of My Vision, sequel to The Third Way of My God. Get it now.

What are the ethical, political and cultural consequences of forgetting how to trust our senses? How can artworks help us see, sense, think, and interact in ways that are outside of the systems of convention and order that frame so much of our lives? In Cultivating Perception through Artworks, Helen Fielding challenges us to think alongside and according to artworks, cultivating a perception of what is really there and being expressed by them. Drawing from and expanding on the work of philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fielding urges us to trust our senses and engage relationally with works of art in the here and now rather than distancing and systematizing them as aesthetic objects. Cultivating Perception through Artworks examines examples as diverse as a Rembrandt painting, M. NourbeSe Philip's poetry, and Louise Bourgeois' public sculpture, to demonstrate how artworks enact ethics, politics, or culture. By engaging with different art forms and discovering the unique way that each opens us to the world in a new and unexpected ways, Fielding reveals the importance of our moral, political, and cultural lives.

Fear is duplicitous. It is both the landlord and the tenant. Fear's voice speaks so loudly while earnestly seeking to silence yours. Hiding Place is about identifying and unmasking the fears that we experience every day; the fear of failure, the fear of success, the fear of inadequacy, the fear of harm, the fear of death, the fear of poverty. The fears that leave us paralyzed and immobile from the joy, truth, love and acceptance that are found in the presence of God. Hiding Place is a spiritual journey through a biblical context from fear's first mention in Genesis 3 to what we continue experiencing from fear today. Learn how to overcome, confront, uproot and evict the tenants of fear by identifying and utilizing the weapons of God's Word, Truth, Name and Power. Come plunge into His Presence, your hiding place is waiting.

Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative engages with the cultural meanings and movements of blindness. This book addresses how blindness is lived in particular contexts—in offices of ophthalmology and psychiatry, in classrooms of higher education, in accessibility service offices, on the street, and at home. Taking the form of a play written in five acts, the narrative dramatizes how the main character’s blindness is conceived of in the world and in the self. Each act includes an analysis where blind studies is explored in relation to disability studies. This work reveals the performative enactment of blindness that is lived in the public as well as in the private corners of the self, demonstrating how blindness is a form of perception. Devon Healey’s work orients to blindness as a necessary and creative feature of the sensorium and shows how blindness is a form of perception.

"Up From The Basement" is an intense personal story about the author who rides an emotional roller coaster as he struggles with his need for psychological recovery and change. Written in a first person narrative style this non-fiction work reads like a novel. The reader is swept into the world and mind of the author as he immerses himself into a maze of self-inquiry. He unravels the layers of self-imposed protection that developed into barriers to the awareness of his inner strength. Motivated by his desire to understand himself and responsibility to eventually help others, this psychological tale challenges the reader to pause for self-reflection while it chronicles the author's ongoing pains and struggles. This insightful flow of internal processing incorporates awareness at the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels. The power of this work lies in the compelling stream of consciousness style that appears chaotic, while mirroring the frantic thought processing of the author. The ongoing temptation will arise for the reader to compare and contrast his or her own personal traits and internal introspection. The story is interspersed with practical applications of the basic principles of "A Course In Miracles", while dealing with personal issues such as fear, depression and forgiveness.

An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher chronicles Trude Klevan's personal experiences of her doctoral journey, with Alec Grant as an external academic resource and friend, and her subsequent entry into the neoliberal higher education environment. It gives a personal and intimate view of what it's like to become an academic. This book is constructed as an extended dialogue which frequently utilizes email exchanges as data. Firmly grounded in the epistemic resource of friendship, it tells the story of the authors’ symbiotic academic growth around their critical understanding and knowledge of qualitative inquiry and the purposes of such knowledge. The tale told is of the unfolding of a close and mutually beneficial relationship, entangled within sometimes facilitative, sometimes problematic, environmental contexts. It uses these experiences to describe, explore, and critically interrogate some underlying themes of the philosophies, politics, and practices of qualitative inquiry, and of higher education. Disrupting conventional academic norms through their work, friendship, and correspondence, Trude and Alec offer a critical and epistemological view of what it's like to become a qualitative researcher, and how we can do things differently in higher education. This book is suitable for all researchers and students, their supervisors, mentors, and teachers, and academics of qualitative research and autoethnography, and those interested in critiques of higher education.