Between Bodies
– emotion • sense • affect –
The second Uppsala University Body/Embodiment Symposium
November 18-19, 2010
Emotion and affect lie at the very heart of our understandings of the world: subjectivity is embedded and embodied and bodies, in their very being, are transgressive and transgressed as the ‘self’ and ‘the world’ bleed into one another through the various porosities of the senses. Such sensory immediacy highlights both the temporal primacy of our senses in understandings of the world but also the way in which particular senses demand attention at particular times in particular contexts. Thus not only are the senses, emotions, and affect, primary to our perception of the world, but they also operate within personal, cultural and political orderings dependent on the positioning of the individual, collective, species. Thus, affecto-emotional registers foster attachment to place, are dependent on space, cultures, technologies; they delineate, reinforce, undermine and are dependent on the material and cultural boundaries which we hold as significant. They are overarched by the multiplicity of approaches, theories and conceptual frameworks that decide which sense(s), emotion(s), affects are significant and how they should be (re)presented. Further, the endemic anthropocentricism of these frameworks has shaped which sensory immediacies are prioritised along the strata of animality, with concepts of sense, subjectivity and emotion simultaneously deployed to police the various divides between human and animal, and also to create the contact zones where human-animal encounters become most apparent.
The symposium takes its point of departure from the role of the body as a centre for emotions, sensations and affectivity. It enquires into the relation between inner emotions and their expression in outer forms of behavior. It questions the role of emotion and affectivity as foundational for intellectual life, for thinking, rationality and communication. It highlights the vast milieu of meetings between human and animal, nature and technology, self and other and places focus on bodily boundaries, points of meeting/melting/tension, kinship and skinship between bodies; making manifest the interrelationality of drawing boundaries and constituting singularities, differences and commonalities. Confirmed Key note speakers are Eva Hayward (University of New Mexico) and Myra Hird (Queens University).
We welcome papers from both within and beyond academia on a wide range of topics within the scope of the overarching theme of the symposium. Please send one page proposals by August 31, 2010 to body(at)gender.uu.se. For questions or further information, please contact the conference organizers Jacob Bull (jacob.bull(at)gender.uu.se) and Lisa Folkmarson Käll (lisa.kall(at)gender.uu.se).