University of Liverpool and University of Bristol are presenting the event “De/Constructing the Body: Ancient and Modern Dynamics”, which will take place on Thursday 30th and Friday 31st July, 2020, 14.45-18.00 on Zoom. Papers will be pre-circulated. Materials and the Zoom link will be sent a week in advance.
This interdisciplinary project led by Georgia Petridou (Liverpool) and Esther Eidinow (Bristol).
This will be the second of three workshops, which explore the ancient and modern body as a biocultural construct.
About the project
Recent post-humanist theories have resulted in a surge of interest in the body as a cultural conception. Moreover, through recent explorations of embodiment, the body, as Csordas (1993, 135) writes, has emerged as “the existential ground of culture”. However, very little attention has been paid to the issue of body as a composite feature, and to debates surrounding corporeal knowledge and relational dynamics. Can the body be construed as one entity or is it really an assemblage of its constituent parts? If the latter, how does the body relate to them? Who determines and controls knowledge about bodies, body parts, and their relational dynamics?
The project engages with these questions and argues for a greater fluidity in both the signification processes and the signifying agents (patients, bodies, body parts, dead bodies, medical scientists, nurses, religious professionals and entrepreneurs, medical insurance policies, medical technology, biopolitics, etc.) that create focus and subsequently define physical and imagined frontiers in the human body. It comprises three exploratory workshops, each on a distinct but interrelated theme, aimed primarily at fostering blue-sky thinking and encouraging close collaborations between experts from the fields of Humanities, Disability Studies, Health and Social Sciences.
About this workshop
This interdisciplinary workshop will consider questions about the openness and closedness of bodies considered as single and multiple entities, and as viewed from and shaped by different cultural perspectives and practices. It will be held on Zoom over two afternoons: papers will be pre-circulated; speakers will briefly present their ideas as a prelude to discussion. Please sign up using the eventbrite invitation below: we will use the list of those signed up to circulate the pre-readings and Zoom details.
Confirmed Speakers
-Dr Ellen Adams (King’s College London)
-Dr Antón Alvar Nuño (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
-Prof. Havi Carel (Bristol)
-Dr Jack Hartnell (East Anglia)
-Dr Teo Hauskeller (Liverpool)
-Dr Georgia Petridou (Liverpool)
-Dr Irene Salvo (Exeter)
