Affective Somaesthetics: Reflections on Flowing and Feeling with Fire Dancers in Thailand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reflects on the entanglement of embodiment and affect in ethnographic research with male fire dancers in Southern Thailand’s tourism industry. I explore my embodied learning with dancers, and my attempts to attune to the affects that structure their worlds and their artistry. Central to fire dancers’ art form is the cultivation of “flow” and particular energies that can be felt through this experience and aesthetic. I examine how my gendered embodiment affected how I moved in and through spaces with fire dancers, and my learning to sense and feel in new ways. The felt experiences and affects in fieldwork created opportunities for different bodily relationalities, including the sharing of embodied knowledge and affects, but they also created moments of rupture and disconnect. In conversation with concepts of affect, embodiment, and somaesthetics, this paper foregrounds “flow” as an affective and embodied methodology that highlights the relational nature of our engagements in the field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".