< back to list of contributors
Michael is a researcher in the cognitive sciences based at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he earned his PhD in 2002. He has applied his specialization in metaphor analysis to various fields of discourse. His interests concern what metaphor reveals about cultural or political thought, the use of metaphor in complex argumentation, and new coding tools for the qualitative study of textual and gestural imagery. One of Michael’s more recent interests lies in the narratological field, where he has used metaphor as a point of departure to theorize sensorimotor reader involvement and the comprehension of complex event structure. In parallel, he has worked on socio-cultural theories of embodiment. This includes research on sensorimotor aspects of cultural concepts. The main theoretical focus concern the scaffolding processes that connect universal constituent schemas acquired in early infancy with complex cultural concepts and ideology. On the applied side, Michaels interest is reflected in cognitive ethnographical work on the use of imagery in cultural fields where persons interact through direct body contact. A current project on Argentine tango focuses on the cognitive basis of joint improvisation and contact-based intersubjectivity. It also takes interest in the process of embodied apprenticeship, metaphors used by teachers to “reconfigure” the novice’s body, and the role of complex imagery that experts learn to use for regulating dynamic cascades of joint motion. This is understood as happening against a background of cultural posture, motion, sensing, and interaction habits. In this context, Michael is engaged in the development of new phenomenological research methods. In particular, the triangulation between participative bodily experiencing, the experience of others, and a background of metaphors in wider currency is accorded an important role. Concerning the experiences of others, Michael is developing interview-based elicitation procedures for tacit body knowledge and video-analytic methods for the study of real-time interaction dynamics.
Links
