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Audio Exercise for "a day in your lab"
Please practice this exercise as part of the assignment "a day in the lab".
You can use headphones or play the audio out load. Make sure that you have documentation tools at hand. You can use the worksheet, downloadable below.
Lab_awareness_exercise.mp3
MP3 Audio File 29.3 MB
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Worksheet for "a day in your lab"
Use this worksheet to document during the audio exercise and/or during your work in the lab. You can also use your notebook or another documentation tool, and keep this worksheet at hand to remember the different aspects of becoming aware of your body in space that we practiced.
Lab_worksheet.pdf
Adobe Acrobat Document 1.3 MB
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Podcast about a day in the lab

Please listen to the episode “Dispatch 6: Strange Times” of the podcast Radio Lab. The part that is of relevance for this assignment (the first part of the episode) takes about 20 minutes. 

 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dispatch-6-strange-times

 

Andrea Pruisers directs the Corona Virus Anti-Viral Research Program. In this podcast, she beautifully illustrates the kind of preparations, care, movements, attentiveness, mindfulness, feelings and thoughts that are at work when she is working in the lab. 

Try to illustrate your working process (when you do research, when you study, collaborate etc) a similar way. Although something like studying for an exam may be quite different from working in the anti-viral research-lab (among others things because this kind of work is very protocol driven and your work probably not so much), for this exercise you will attend to the process with the same kind of precision. Hence, even though every step of your work is not as methodically set out for you as the work described in the podcast, as a thought experiment you pretend that it is, as a means to create body awareness in relation to your work.

Imagine a typical research day and attend to: 

 

-       What and how you prepare before starting your work 

-       The intentionality with which you do everything

-       How you move

-       Your mental state

-       Your concerns 

-       The order in which you do things 

-       The qualities of your movements and bodily tensions

-       Your mental state and headspace

-       How you are aware of things that happen around you

-       The way you relate to space 

-       The way you relate to objects around you 

-       The way you relate to other bodies around you

-       The way you relate to the objects and materials you touch, move around, manipulate or handle. 

-       Your thoughts and feelings

-       Your focus 

-       The way you are present

-       Your sense of time

-       Anything else that stood out for you when listening to the podcast