Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In 2006 there was an important change in parental leave for the Canadian province of Quebec. Prior to this time all Canadian fathers could share 1 year parental leave, but the introduction of a new more generous Quebec Parental Insurance Program (QPIP) changed the situation and behaviour of fathers quite radically. This new non-transferable, more highly compensated, regime was associated with a rapid increase of participation of fathers, from 57 % in 2007 to 80 % in 2014. The changing policy environment is reviewed in the chapter, which sets the scene for findings from a qualitative study of the experience of 34 Quebec fathers who have been on leave alone with their child.

We focus on the experience of fathers who took parental or paternity leave, alone with the child for at least one month, centering on their relations with the child and wider family relationships, as well as the emotions experienced during this period. Findings show that taking the leave alone allows the father to develop a relationship of paternity as intense as the mother with the child. Quebec fathers in this study reported creating a strong “connection” or “bond” with the child. A majority of the sample interviewed had a progressive or innovative attitude towards paternity presenting a radical break with the traditional father model, assuming a new role.

In this introduction, editors Felicity Callard, Kimberley Staines and James Wilkes describe the problem of rest – a ubiquitous concept whose presence or absence affects people, in different ways, everywhere. Depending on whether one is working clinically, historically, artistically, scientifically or through political and economic analysis, ‘rest’ has many looks and feels. The complexities of investigating such a phenomenon gave rise to Hubbub, the project out of which this edited book emerged. The editors describe how the book draws on research and practice undertaken during Hubbub’s two-year residency in The Hub at Wellcome Collection. They outline the book’s organizing structure, which groups the work of social scientists, scientists, humanities scholars, artists and broadcasters by scale of investigation, into minds, bodies and practices.

Psychologist Ben Alderson-Day and geographer Felicity Callard share an interest in understanding how interdisciplinary approaches to the brain sciences that involve the social sciences and humanities can help open up new research questions and methods through which to understand pathological and non-pathological states of mind. Both have been interested in the fertility of resting-state research paradigms and the default mode network in this regard. Ben has collaborated on novel experimental investigations of inner experience during the resting state, and Felicity has focused on how tracing historical antecedents of resting-state research might reorient certain current scientific assumptions.

This chapter explores the relationship between mental rest and wandering thoughts as conceived in the literature of the early medieval monastic tradition. As with contemporary neuroscientific models, medieval theologians were aware of the mind’s natural propensity to roam and drift away from a task toward unrelated thoughts and feelings. While universal and unavoidable, this was nonetheless unacceptable, and monks were instructed to make every effort to still wandering thoughts. For the monks, therefore, mental rest involved unceasing vigilance and mental exertion, for it was a task which, if neglected, could lead to spiritual destitution.

This chapter was conceived during an interdisciplinary psychological experiment, in which geographer Hazel Morrison asked participants to record and describe in face-to-face interviews their everyday experiences of mind wandering. Questions abound concerning the legitimacy of interviewee narratives when describing subjective experience, and the limits of language in achieving ‘authentic’ description. These concerns increase when looking at mind - [‘mind-wandering experiences’] wandering experiences, because of the absence of meta-cognition during periods of self-generated thought. Here, Hazel explores the tensions at play in twentieth-century discourses around the self, fantasy and expression.

Felicity Callard’s interest in the long history of research into daydreaming, fantasy and reverie, and the ways in which this subterranean tradition might productively complicate contemporary cognitive scientific investigations of mind wandering, has been a significant focus of her work for Hubbub. In this chapter, she conjures up an imaginary archive of the daydream, as yet dispersed across disciplinary fields and points in time and space, alludes to some of its heterogeneous contents, and asks what the power of such an archive-to-come might be.

This chapter outlines the practice of descriptive experience sampling (DES), a methodology with which Hubbub has experimented. Interdisciplinary DES experiments and workshops during when Hubbub’s residency brought collaborators together to explore the profoundly varied ways in which the resting state can be conceptualized, and the different forms that perspectives on aspects of inner experience might take.

James Wilkes and Holly Pester, both poets, write here about their engagement with the descriptive experience sampling (DES) method, which stemmed from an interdisciplinary encounter with the psychologist Russell Hurlburt, and their experience of being trained as subjects in this technique. This chapter considers how DES can be used in unexpected ways to think through vexed questions in poetics about the relationship between experience and language, and the material ways in which experience might be captured. James and Holly consider the deployment of DES in the context of a poetry reading, which emerges as a space of multiple, distributed and distractable attention.

In this chapter, Claudia Hammond and Gemma Lewis discuss The Rest Test, the world’s largest survey into people’s subjective experiences of rest, devised by an interdisciplinary team at Hubbub. The Rest Test was launched in collaboration with the BBC on Radio 4’s , presented by Claudia, who played a key role in the survey development. Gemma led the analysis of The Rest Test results.

This chapter is based on a talk given by historian Ayesha Nathoo at the ‘Mindfulness Unpacked’ symposium at Wellcome Collection in February 2016, which was linked to the ‘Tibet’s Secret Temple’ exhibition. While the exhibition contextualized mindfulness within the Buddhist tradition, Ayesha’s research on the history of therapeutic relaxation provided an opportunity to demonstrate the social and structural links between secular mindfulness and twentieth-century relaxation practices.