This looks like a really interesting project, from fellow Penn history of science product Josh Berson:
Dramatic changes are unfolding in the shape of inhabited space, characterized by growing density, mobility, and noise. These changes have implications for how we hold and move our bodies, how we gauge intentionality in others, and how we enact shared intentions and emotions—in short, for how we are socialized and acculturated as kinesthetic and somatosensory beings….
We are, at every moment, engaged in a process of ‘somatic niche construction’, shaping our environment to support particular habits of movement and embodied cognition and at the same time adapting our habits to environmental circumstance. Niche construction is political: we don’t all share the same capacities to reshape our living space to accommodate or modulate a distinctive somatic signal, nor do we share the same value schemata—what looks like mania to you may feel like flourishing to me.
Josh is certainly right to point out that for many people, the ability to control their environments in order to control the contents of their consciousness, to paraphrase William James, is an expression of power. The ability to say “hold all calls” (to someone who will then hold their calls), or to go off the grid when going on vacation, reflects a measure of privilege, an ability to control one’s space and access to it.
But the ability is one that anyone can reclaim, though cultivating it does require work. The Southern California Prison Meditation Project, or the Prison Mindfulness Project on the East Coast, helps build an interior capacity for niche construction among people with very little real power in their daily lives. You might also whether monastics are privileged in a way the rest of the world recognizes. They live strictly-ordered lives, and vows of poverty and obedience (not to mention chastity) aren’t exactly ones you see CEOs or politicians taking. Yet for those who take to the life find the challenges very rewarding, and the ability to live without the distractions of the normal world essential to their spiritual growth.
The point is, I don’t want to give up the idea of “niche construction” as a political act that’s only available to the powerful. Even in today’s world, it’s still available as an act of resistance, a way to challenge the system and deny it the ability to shape you completely.