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The Body and Pseudoscience in the Long Nineteenth Century (CfP, Newcastle University, 18 June 2016)

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Research Summary: The Body and Pseudoscience in the Long Nineteenth Century

Event Type: Interdisciplinary Academic Conference
Institution: Newcastle University
Conference Date: 18 June 2016
Primary Focus: Examination of heterodox and marginal scientific discourses concerning the body during the nineteenth century and their contributions to modern orthodox disciplines.
Key Themes: The boundary between ‘scientific' and ‘pseudoscientific' knowledge; contested systems of bodily knowledge; gendered bodies; the entranced body; visual and textual representations in journalism, fiction, and periodicals.
Scholarly Framework: Interdisciplinary analysis across visual and verbal texts to evaluate what knowledge may have been lost or preserved in the professionalization and self-authentication of scientific disciplines.
Suggested Topics: Experimentation on the body; pseudoscience and gender; spiritualist practices (séance rooms); Victorian periodicals; literary treatments of pseudoscience by poets and novelists.
Submission Requirements: 250-300 word abstract with brief biography required by 31 January 2016.
Theoretical Approach: Challenges the assumption that ‘pseudoscience' represents unambiguous scientific failure, instead questioning what intellectual and practical insights were marginalized during disciplinary consolidation.

PsuedoScienceCOnferenceInterdisciplinary Conference: ‘Sciences we now retrospectively regard as heterodox or marginal cannot be considered unambiguously to have held that status at a time when no clear orthodoxy existed that could confer that status upon them’ (Alison Winter, 1997). The nineteenth century witnessed the drive to consolidate discrete scientific disciplines, many of which were concerned with the body. Attempts were made to clarify the boundaries between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘pseudoscientific’, between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. This conference asks what became lost in separating the orthodox from the heterodox. What happened to the systems of knowledge and practice relating to the body that were marginalised as ‘pseudoscience’? Was knowledge and insight into the human condition lost in the process? Or is it immortalised within the literature of ‘pseudoscience’?

This interdisciplinary conference considers how different discourses of the body were imagined and articulated across a range of visual and verbal texts (including journalism, fiction, popular science writing, illustration) in order to evaluate how ‘pseudoscience’ contributed both to understandings of the body and what it is to be human and to the formation of those disciplines now deemed orthodox.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Acting on the body – the body as a site of experimentation and scientific contestation
  • Pseudoscience and the gendered body
  • The entranced body as the conduit for knowledge of the self
  • The ‘scientifically’ prescribed body – an attempt to rationalise the irrational?
  • ‘Pseudoscience’ and the speculative nature of ‘science’
  • Scientific disciplines – a move towards self-authentication and professionalization or a loss of universal truth?
  • Pseudoscience and abnormality
  • The discourse of gender in the séance room
  • Visual interpretations of the ‘pseudoscientific’
  • Victorian periodicals / popular science journals and ‘pseudoscience’ of the body
  • Reading the body – fiction immortalising the pseudoscientific
  • The attraction of the ‘pseudoscientific’ for C19 poets and novelists
  • Visual interpretations of the ‘pseudoscientific’

Please email a 250 to 300 word abstract, together with a brief biography, by 31 January 2016.

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