Can books help us heal? The author of this recent article on Psyche shares his experience of bibliotherapy: "Reading books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal". Here is the link to the article: Reading Books as a Therapy. Enjoy! Keeping up the "Spreading the Word" tradition, I hope to share … Continue reading Spreading the Word: What Is Bibliotherapy?
Heraclitus Meets Derrida and Saunders: Misunderstanding and Oversimplification
Misunderstandings are one of the typical features of being human. We can be confident in declaring that every person who has ever lived has misunderstood others and was misunderstood by others at least once in life. This reveals the interpretive structure of our thinking and the fundamental role understanding plays in our lives. Understanding is … Continue reading Heraclitus Meets Derrida and Saunders: Misunderstanding and Oversimplification
Spreading the Word: What Is Lived Experience?
People use the expression 'lived experience' with increasing frequency. We usually mean it as the first-person privileged access to a particular way of experiencing something. Usually, this particular way is intertwined with and expressed in various social identity terms. My lived experience as a woman, as a migrant, as an Eastern European, and so on. … Continue reading Spreading the Word: What Is Lived Experience?
Measuring and Living an Experience
What's the weather like where you are now? How would you check it - glance out the window, open it to get a feel, step outside, consult your preferred weather app? From this follows a more intriguing question - which would you trust more, your lived experience or a measurement? I'm from a generation that … Continue reading Measuring and Living an Experience
Spreading the Word: Being Ashamed Of Your Accent
Immigrants are often ashamed of their accents or feel uncomfortable because of how they sound. Why? Because language is not just a tool, it contains a world of implied social and cultural norms, values, beliefs, and presuppositions. In many languages, there is one way of speaking it that is considered 'proper'. I have read and … Continue reading Spreading the Word: Being Ashamed Of Your Accent
To Speak A Language Is To Participate In A World
In his book, "Black Skin, White Masks", Frantz Fanon argues that language, far from just a tool for conveying information, expresses a world implied by it. In other words, words matter in shaping who I am in your eyes, as does my tone of voice, accent, dialect, and so on. If I am a foreigner speaking your … Continue reading To Speak A Language Is To Participate In A World
Spreading the Word: Deep Reading in the Digital Age
We live in an increasingly digital world where the race for our attention is growing ever faster. Messages, notifications, updates, comments, and on and on and on the eternal scroll goes. This environment influences us even when we don't realise it. Distraction happens also when I do not pick up my phone to check the … Continue reading Spreading the Word: Deep Reading in the Digital Age
What Is A Good Book? Philosophical Response
What do we mean when we evaluate a book as good or bad? Let's take a philosophical look at it.
Spreading the Word: No Such Thing as Absolute Clarity
Many of us are taught at school that we should know the right answers, that that is a sign of knowledge. As children grow, they learn that society expects certain things of them and that those are the right things. Right answers, right behaviour, right thoughts. And the opposite is, of course, wrong. This approach … Continue reading Spreading the Word: No Such Thing as Absolute Clarity
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