CALL FOR PAPERS : ‘Body, Corporeality and Identity’
A One-day Postgraduate, Multidisciplinary Workshop
With Keynote Speaker PROF. CHRIS SHILLING (Kent University)
Durham University, Saturday 19th May 2012, 9.30 – 4.00pm
At Durham University, workshops have explored human sensory experience and engagement with the material world, audiences and corporeal displays and what it is to be human. Continuing this innovation and momentum, this workshop builds on the wider international debate on Body Theory and creates a multidisciplinary, environment for postgraduates and early career researchers to discuss crucial themes in the study of the body. Philosophical, sociological, geographical, and anthropological scholarship has increasingly addressed the ways in which we approach material culture and perception of the body. Research by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mike Featherstone, Margaret Turner and Chris Shilling among others has identified, albeit in different ways, the significance of the interrelationships between the body, the world and the other. From human representation and mortuary activities to public and domestic spheres, the body in society is translated, manipulated and used in a range of material and metaphysical expressions. As such, the body is an essential research topic that transcends disciplines, timeframes and geographies. This workshop thus aims to bring together postgraduates from disciplines across the social sciences and discuss their material and theoretical approach to the study of the human body.
Speakers are asked to consider how their discipline can contribute to the study of the body, to critique the concept of body identity and examine how it might be constituted (though not limited to) through the following:
Body schema (corporeal appearances, size and capacities)
Performance and Space
Ritual and Religion
Architecture and objects
Materiality and Corporeality
Health and Medicine
We invite postgraduates and early career researchers from the social sciences to submit an abstract by Friday 20th April 2012 of c. 250 words to [email protected]. This workshop is free to attend by all but we ask that you RSVP (to the same email address) by Friday 20th April 2012 so that we can arrange appropriate hospitalities.