Güler Cansu Ağören

In birth literature, there is a consensus that birth narratives incorporating a strong sense of agency contribute to the person’s well-being postpartum and beyond. In this article, I aimed to develop an ecological perspective on the emergence of birthing-self narratives and analyse the restrictions experienced in forming empowering birth narratives from the affordance perspective. The concept of affordance has equipped philosophers with a useful tool to study organism–environment relations and to look beyond dualities such as internal and external, biological and environmental, physical and social etc. I argue that this conceptual framework can be fruitful in understanding the emergence of agency and selfhood during birth. Authentic birthing-self narratives are necessarily rooted in the encompassing birth assemblages and reconceptualizing birth assemblage as a system producing narrative affordances for the birthing-self may contribute (1) to supporting a contextual account of self-experience and agency in birth and (2) to illustrate through birth the complexity of the affordance space in which human organisms develop self-experiences. In this study, I dwell on my research and analyse three birthing-self narratives to illustrate how feelings of a birthing body intra-act with physical, social, institutional, and discursive space to shape affordances for narrating the birthing-self.

Phenomenologists define social impairments as key aspects of depression and argue that depression is irreducible to the individual. In this article I aim to further elaborate this non-reductionist notion of depression by claiming that depression not only corresponds to an impaired experience of social relations, but also arises from a socially impaired world. To pursue this goal, I will challenge the understanding of depression as an affective disorder blocking the affective communication between individual and environment. I will redefine feelings of depression as situated affections, and hence suggest that (1) they are products of the individual's situatedness in a depressogenic environment and (2) they function in initiating an active withdrawal from such environment.

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 55-65, January 2022. Phenomenologists define social impairments as key aspects of depression and argue that depression is irreducible to the individual. In this article I aim to further elaborate this non-reductionist notion of depression by claiming that depression not only corresponds to an impaired experience of social relations, but also arises from a socially impaired world. To pursue this goal, I will challenge the understanding of depression as an affective disorder blocking the affective communication between individual and environment. I will redefine feelings of depression as situated affections, and hence suggest that they are products of the individual's situatedness in a depressogenic environment and they function in initiating an active withdrawal from such environment.