Research on Feeling and Meaning
The primary emphasis of my current research is finding better ways to make sense of the interdependence of feeling and meaning-making as experienced processes.
Feeling needs to be re-conceptualized as a more active, situated, interactive and distributed, culture- and situation- specific process. Not simply as a passive-reactive, intra-individual one, based on an oversimplified view of a few universal basic emotions. Then we can see how feeling is very much like meaning-making, like all semiotic processes; and better understand how the interplay between feeling and meaning works.
Feeling includes felt-sensations sometimes called qualia, but it is primarily a bodily process that gauges our current status in our immediate environment and situates that sense of being in relation to memory and anticipation across multiple timescales ranging across past, present, and future. My recent work has centered on identifying the very large number of named feelings and delineating organizing patterns for these, based on prior work on the semantics of evaluations and attitudes.
Linked below are writings on these issues:
Feeling & Meaning: A Unitary Bio-Semiotic Account [Handbook of Semiotics, 2015]
Affective Learning Together (2013)
Thinking about Feeling [in Erstad & Sefton-Green, Cambridge U Press, 2013]
Emotion, Play, and Learning: Gaming After School [to appear]
Feeling and Meaning: A Unified Framework [DRAFT – Do Not Cite]
Affect, Identity, and Representation [Paper at ICLS 2010]
Affect, Identity, and Representation in Science & Mathematics [.pptx 5MB]