Mark James

I am a graduate of the University College Dublin, Consciousness and Embodiment, MA program, and I am presently undertaking a PhD in Cognitive Science at UCD, under the supervision of Dr. Fred Cummins and Dr. Maria Baghramian.
During my MA I was primarily concerned with the topic of embodied intersubjectivity. For my MA thesis I worked on an account by which shared habits emerge in the quotidian dynamics of recurrent interactions.

I was recently awarded the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship from the Irish Research Council for my PhD project, entitled Negotiating Multiple Allegiances: The Experience of Conflict During Protest and Prayer –  an Empirical Investigation.

This project is to unfold in two stages: early stages of the project aim to empirically probe the processes of interactional habit formation (and other attendant processes) that I have theorised elsewhere and will continue to develop throughout, and later project stages will seek to utilise this empirically informed appreciation. One present domain of potential applicability is in consideration of dissonance phenomena (i.e. the experience of dissonance) due to disagreement among group members. It might be worthwhile considering to what extent so called ‘mechanisms of inconsistency reduction’ can be thought about in terms of interactionally habituated processes.

I am not formally a researcher within the WEXD program, however, I will be participating in a more informal capacity in the WEXD workshops and conferences throughout the course of my PhD. I also hope to contribute to the WEXD blog and the broader conversation as I develop my position in relation to some of the issues that WEXD concerns itself with.
When I am not doing something related to the above I am likely doing one of three things: making music, training brazilian jiu jitsu, or cooking. More information about me can be found on my personal website, and you can follow me on twitter at @markmjames