The 6th International Dance and Somatic Practices Conference 2023

Description

PROVOCATIONS ROUNDTABLE:
HOW IS YOUR RESEARCH EMBODIED?
@ the Dance & Somatic Practices Conference 2023 in Coventry, UK

FRIDAY JULY 14, 14:30 – 16:30
Hybrid, online & on-site.

CONVENORS: Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Jessica Rajko

PANELISTS: Simon Ellis, Lindsay T. Gianoukas, Carolyn Deby, Zrinka Uzbinecz, Nicole Michalla, Jane Chan, Muindi Fanuel Muindi, Sha Xin Wei

ABSTRACT:
Following an Open Call for Provocations in response to the question: how is your research embodied?, this Roundtable Discussion brings together ‘provocateurs’ to explore the effects of embodiment within and between disciplinary cultures.

The notion of ‘embodiment’ is integral to contemporary discourse about human interactions with technology across the arts, sciences, and humanities. In the fields of dance and somatic practices, the notion of embodiment is often employed to foreground the unique expertise of artists/scholars engaged in body- and movement-based research, and further, to transmit this knowledge to other domains. At the intersection of dance with computer science and cognitive science, the notion of embodied cognition is key to positioning the material body as a site of thought, concept, and language formation.

Increasingly, articulations of embodiment reach beyond the individual human subject as source, to consider relational agency in meaning-making processes. In posthumanist and new materialist theory, the thing-we-call-a-body is always already both biological and artificial, constituted via ongoing circulation beneath and beyond the skin. Pervasive computational and biomedical interventions into human bodies and identities point to the distributed nature of embodiment, blurring lines between self/other and human/nonhuman in the production of knowledge. Further, bridging phenomenological perspectives with broader social and cultural concerns, the growing use of hybrid terms such as ‘ecosomatics’ and ‘somatechnics’ speaks to the need for transdisciplinary exchange.

Insisting on embodiment, however, suggests that there is something other – namely, disembodiment. Rather than reinforcing this well-worn binary, we seek to foreground multiplicity-within interpretations of embodiment, and to probe the perceived effects of embodiment in relation to disciplinary motives, methods, and modes of articulation. We pose this question in the context of the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, because the stakes of asserting embodied knowledge are particularly high for this community. By drawing in experts from across disciplines, the aim is to explore generative differences in understandings of embodiment, and more specifically, embodied research.

Period	14 Jul 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Coventry, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International