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Paper short abstract:

Hospice care workers are exposed to extended periods of suffering during patients’ dying process. To prevent the experience of compassion fatigue four hospices participated in a research project that evaluated how mindfulness and compassion training enabled them to stay present among the dying.

Paper long abstract:

Hospice care workers are at risk for developing compassion fatigue due to numerous emotional demands and recurrent exposure to death and dying. Research shows that these stressors can reduce the capacity for caring for patients and relatives, thereby compromise the quality of care.

An intervention, that might prevent compassion fatigue, was offered to four Danish hospices. It consisted of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and compassion training adjusted to hospice workers. At the core of this training lies an assumption that presence can be enhanced through different techniques.

Based on a mixed method design, the study consisted of questionnaires on stress, resilience and work ability, supplemented with in-depth interviews, focus group interviews and participant observation. 20 participants were interviewed twice before and half way through the MBSR and compassion training. The in-depth interviews were supplied with 8 focus group interviews including 38 participants and conducted after finalising the training.

In their evaluation, the hospice care workers described how they discovered new ways to stay present. They stressed the importance of paying attention to bodily sensations, like tensions or relaxed body parts to notice their own reactions to a situation. They also spoke of becoming aware of their own breathing and thereby presentifying themselves. By training presence through techniques that enhance sensorial awareness, the hospice care workers learned to anchor themselves in their bodily being. This raises the discussion, not only on the understanding of presence as an embodied practice, but also whether being present is something that can be learned.

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Paper short abstract:

Using the example of academic online teaching, the paper analyses how different forms of digital co-presence are created by social practices and media dispositives and in how far the perception of presence as well as accordant norms have changed in the course of the pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

As Stefan Beck (2000) has stated, technogenic spaces can function as dimensions of socialization. Yet, in how far do they create a sense of presence, of “being there”?

Taking the example of online-teaching within German universities during the covid 19 pandemic, based on data of surveys among university students and lecturers, recent studies and my own observations, I will explore how digital co-presence is constituted and how the concept of presence changes in online settings.

Mainly drawing on affordance theory, ANT and media theory, and parting from Erwing Goffmans (2001) concept of social interaction, I will outline preconditions of the experience of presence and different aspects shaping it – like the engagement of different senses, immersion and the possibility of multimodal interaction. Moreover, I will show specific influential factors produce different forms of online co-presence, e.g., the interplay of media dispositives and users, who create the experience of presence through their actions, perceptions, feelings and constructions of meaning, and their effects on lifeworlds, identities and the (bodily) self.

Also, I will discuss in how far the perception of presence is subjected to societal norms, habitualization processes and strategies of making oneself at home (as described, e.g., by Hermann Bausinger, Ina Maria Greverus and Simone Eggel).

In conclusion I propose that firstly, presence can be interpreted not as a state but as unfolding process of doing presence through social practices and secondly, that presence can be understood as being related to one another.

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Paper short abstract:

By investigating the experiences of migrant parents supervising their children doing homework from afar via CCTV, this study reflects on the practice of virtual presence as ways of accompaniment and control at the same time in distant childcare provision.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades, the tens of millions of children in China lived apart from parents who work in remote places. This study examines how parents produce the sense of presence by installing CCTV at home and how this specific type of “presence” is experienced by children and parents respectively.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data obtained from 2020 to 2021 in migrants’ destination city Hangzhou and their rural hometown in Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangxi provinces in China, the study finds, on the one hand, “being there” through CCTV reduces the spatial distance between parents and left-behind children during labor migration. It decreases the parents’ guiltiness for unable to meet the parental obligation, and it allows parents to supervise the children’s after school study activities as much as other non-migrant parents. On the other hand, it exaggerates the sense of mistrust in parent-child relation, especially from the perspective of children. The use of CCTV may finally lead to deterioration of the already fragile family relationship due to separation. Besides empirical analysis, this research further reflects on the role of presence as both accompanying and controlling.

The findings of this study enrich the body of scholarship by giving voices to both parents and children in translocal living arrangement, helping them to construct meanings of the CCTV-assited virtual presence. Documenting the intertwining moral and emotional experiences, this paper also underscores the consequence of sensory-physical transformation in caregiving during migration.

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Paper short abstract:

The non-physical space of virtual world offers the possibility to reconstruct one's self and to explore 'identities' of other people more or less familiar to us in the real world. Hence, an 'a priori' phenomenological self-inquiry would steer the research towards a more epistemic-accurate pathway.

Paper long abstract:

Online environments provide new challenges for reconsidering the epistemological approach of social sciences. Virtual reality might facilitate creation of new 'personae' or just the arise of the inner most uninhibited ones. Social sciences have thus the chance to analyze new forms of sociability that mark the cyberspace. Becoming a part of virtual reality offers the opportunity of reshaping one’s own identity and, furthermore, of exploring the various identities of other individuals who are more or less familiar to us in the real world. Once inside this cultural environment, a social scientist has to engage in a phenomenological endeavor over the individual and social impact of Internet, before tackling the actual fieldwork.

The aim of such an endeavor is to create an 'a priori' instrument capable of helping the researcher in social sciences to anticipate and manage the possible diversions that the virtual environment could inflict on the collection and, ultimately, on the validity and fidelity of data. This instrument, both 'etic' and 'emic', should comprise a body of inquiries that lead to a self-questioning about the congruence of means and intentions of the researcher while recording and sharing various experiences in the cyberspace of today and in the Metaverse of tomorrow. This approach requires, first of all, to appraise the extent to which the evolutionary trends of cyberspace and Metaverse, designed by private multinational agents, would be able to preserve the cultural complexity of the human being apart from its status as "user" of digital platforms.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines virtual and embodied modes of presence of Odissi dance schools in the Eastern Indian town Bhubaneswar in the early 2020ies. It assesses the differences in the sensory responses they initiate, and their relation to the present social scape of Odissi in this geographical location.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines different modalities of presence of schools of Odissi dance - a practice officially considered to be one of the “classical dances of India” - in the Eastern Indian town Bhubaneswar.

In my recent ethnography in this town, from September 2021 onwards, I used the Internet as well as physical visits to school locations as complementary tools for assessing Odissi dance activity in the city in the early 2020ies.

Odissi dance schools are present both in virtual and physical spaces: in discourses on notoriety, in the geographical space of the rapidly spreading town – at its margins and at its center – in the topography of google maps, on websites.

During my inquiries, the differences between these modes of presence initiated in me very different sensory responses. Common discourses on the greatness of the tradition may stand in stark contrast to the precarious aspects and/or environments of some of the actual physical schools. Furthermore, these narrative constructions are not perceivable through Internet tools such as google maps, while they may be underlined on the websites of individual schools. On the other side, presences on the web are not always consistent with presences in the actual physical space of the town.

What do these varied, sometimes contradictory, modalities of presence reveal on the existences and existential struggles of Odissi dance practitioners? Do new modes of being present contribute to reshuffling the previously prevalent social order of Odissi dance networks, or on the contrary reinforce it?