Bianca Briciu
Profile
Bianca Briciu PhD is an assistant professor in the Providence School of Transformative Leadership and Spirituality. She is interested in the cultivation of human potential in all areas of intelligence: cognitive, embodied, emotional, spiritual. She is currently engaged in research on the transformative effects of mindfulness, empathy and compassion as aspects of emotional intelligence. After many years of researching the individual and social cost generated by systems of domination, inequality and injustice, Bianca is committed to the intellectual and spiritual development of leaders that can transform their communities and organizations.
- Conflict Resolution
- Colonization processes and cultural changes
- Feeling and Ethics
- Emotions and the body
- Human Rights
- Multiculturalism
- Positive psychology
- Non-violent Social change
- Feminisms
- Human Development
- Transformative Leadership
- Art and Politics
- Creativity
PhD Cultural Mediations, Carleton University, Canada, 2013
MA Film Studies, Carleton University, Canada, 2008
MA Gender Studies, Kobe University, Japan, 2005
- The Revolutionary Art of Love
This is a project that explores the multidimensionality of love, building a case for more awareness of our emotional landscape for optimal experiences of love. - The Transformative Capacity of Imagination: Experiencing our Shared Humanity
This paper analyzes the intersubjective dimensions of imagination, focusing on strategies that help us experience at an embodied level a sense of shared humanity. - Empathy and Social Responsibility in Documentary
This research analyzes the representation of the refugee experience in documentaries, arguing that these films rely on powerful strategies of eliciting empathy for spectators, engaging them at a deep emotional level and making the case for social responsibility. The first part focuses on theories of empathy and identification and the second considers the articulation of an embodied refugee experience in films like Exodus: Our Journey to Europe and Human Flow.
1. Book Chapters
“The Female Body as Transgressor of National Boundaries in Imamura Shohei’s The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi, madamu Onboro no seikatsu, 1970)” in The Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura, edited by Lindsay Coleman and David Desser, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
2. Refereed Journals
1. Become Undone-The Ecstatic Potential of Pleasure and the Barriers of Mind/Body and Gender Dualism in Writing from Below, La Trobe University, Australia, 2019-paper accepted
2. Educating the Heart. Mindfulness and Compassion in the Study and Practice of
Traditional Thai Massage in Journal of East-West Thought, June, 2016
3. Universal or National Peace Education? The Visceral and the Moral in the 1950s
Japanese Antiwar Film in Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies,
2013
4. Love and Power: The Objectification of the Female Body in Hani Susumu’s
Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi jigokuhen, 1968) in Journal of Japanese and
Korean Cinema, 2013
5. At the Frontier of the Skin: Rape and Body Politics in Intentions of Murder (Akai
satsui, Imamura Shohei, 1964), in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, Josai
University, Tokyo, August 2012
6. Symbols of the Mother in Depth Psychology and Contemporary Feminism in
Cross-Cultural Studies, Kobe University, No 11, 2004
3. Translations
1. “Postwar Japanese Melodrama,” by Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Review of Japanese Culture and Society: Unfinished Business: The Endless Postwar in Japanese Cinema and Visual Culture, Vol. XXI , 2009, Pp. 19-32
2. “Beyond Fuji Mountain and Lenin’s Hat-The Danger of Identity in Taniguchi Senkichi’s Akasen kichi (The Red Light Military Base, 1953)” by Nakamura Hideyuki, Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, Routledge, 2019
- Conquering Countries, Possessing Bodies – Policies of Imperialism
- “Japanese Devil” or Universal Humanist? – Refashioning the Japanese Male Subject in The Human Condition (1959 – 1961)
- Bitter Memories or Peace Education? The Visceral and the Moral in the 1950s Japanese Film.
- Documenting Japan’s Transnational Embodied History: Imamura Shohei’s Documentaries.
- Empathy and Social Responsibility in Documentary Film
- The Transformative Capacity of Imagination: Experiencing our Shared Humanity
Teacher of the Year
2015
I have an interdisciplinary formation and an insatiable curiosity about the world which helps me stay engaged at all times. I lived and studied in Japan and Thailand and I am interested in contemplative thought and practices as well as the more recent presence of these practices in the field of psychology. I love working with people and expanding their horizons about the world and themselves.