Tore Dag Bøe, Ph.D.

Amsterstien 23
4516 Mandal, Norway

Phone: +47 41236110
Email: tore.d.boe@uia.no
Web: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tore_Dag_Boe

Tore Dag Bøe is a social worker with master’s degree in community mental health. He has worked in various services in mental health care; inpatients ward, outpatient clinic and a day care center. In his practice he has been engaged in developing good services based on user participation and collaboration with local communities and networks.

Tore Dag recently (2016) finished his Ph.D exploring change related to dialogical practices in mental health care. This study combines the experiential perspectives of the clients themselves with ideas from dialogue philosophy, as found in Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas, among others.  In his Ph.D he in particular focuses the way adolescents’ descriptions of their difficulties – and ways out of their difficulties – seem to be about their movement of the body in interplay with the movement of the body of others. In this way the human phenomena captured by the term mental health seem to be of a more bodily character the usually thought of.  The body in movement that is given attention in a way doesn’t coincide with the body that natural science (and medicine) talks about; rather it is the expressive and vital body that is animated in the realm of dialogues. It is the body seen from a phenomenological perspective: expressive and responding to others expressions; sensing and being sensed by others, moving and being moved by others. Further, based on both the clients own descriptions and theoretical ideas he suggests that bodily movement should not be seen as something outside language. On the contrary, human movement should be regarded as language. Here he leans on Emmanuel Levinas who speaks of three dimensions in language; the hermeneutical, the expressive and the ethical. In such Levinasian view on language both the ethical and the expressive dimension in language is about how we are bodily exposed to each other and how we respond bodily to this exposure. He is also inspired by the phenomenological-corporeal perspectives of Maxime Sheets-Johnstone who is giving movement a fundamental significance when exploring human existence.

Tore Dag is now working as Associate Professor at the Department for Psychosocial Health, University of Agder, Norway. His interests are related to practice, education and research. He has a particular interest in the fundamental significance of ethics, relations and language in mental health.