2017 Conferences
Fall 2017 International Conference
"Bodies in the Streets: Somaesthetics of City Life"
The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture hosted a 2-day conference, January 26–27, 2017, at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.
Cities are defined by their complex network of busy streets and the diverse multitudes of busy people that populate and animate those streets through their physical presence and bodily actions. The human bodies and movements we find in the streets often differ dramatically – the elegant flâneur or strolling window-shopper versus the homeless beggars who make the pavement their bed, the crowds who fill the streets in protest and the patrolling law-enforcement officers who police them. If cities are shaped by human bodies, then those bodies are reciprocally shaped by the spaces, rhythms, and logics of city life. What are the somaesthetic qualities of urban living, its affordances, and challenges (from better cultural and medical services to the cramped quarters and polluted air that many city dwellers must endure)? What are the somatic images of urban life? What paths or models of somaesthetic thinking can help us bring the rich diversity of city life into a more rewarding harmony that remains dynamically progressive? This conference will address these questions from the perspectives of the visual arts, literature, urbanism, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics.
Selected papers may be developed for publication in The Journal of Somaesthetics (https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/JOS) or in an edited book based on the conference papers.
The conference program is now available. To view, click here.
A comprehensive list of our 2017 conference presenters and abstracts may be viewed by following this link.
You may read the press release by following this link.
“Bodies of Virtue: Asian Perspectives on Ethics and Somaesthetics”
The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture hosted a 2-day conference on November 8-9, 2017 at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.
Bodies are the primary platform where self-cultivation techniques develop in Asian cultures. Although proponents of somatic self-cultivation present body disciplines as fundamental instruments for liberation, others sought to twist bodies into tools for oppression and control. Not only considered as a tool for self-improvement in the path to ethical and spiritual progress, the body was contrastingly regarded as an abiding threat to morality and spirituality. How are we to understand and navigate these paradoxes? How are these different views represented not only in religious and philosophical texts but also in art and literature? Asian perspectives on embodiment, together with Asian somatic disciplines, are increasingly pervasive in Western culture. How does this transcultural travel take place? In what ways are the original ideas distorted, misunderstood, or enriched by their importation into new contexts? How do contemporary Asian cultures regard their own traditions and reconcile them with those of Western modernity? How do gender and sexuality studies provide new ways to understand how the microcosm of the body interfaces with the larger structures of religion, politics, and culture? The conference “Bodies of Virtue: Asian Perspectives on Ethics and Somaesthetics” will address these questions from the diverse disciplinary perspectives of religion, philosophy, history, the visual arts, literature, cultural and gender studies, and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics.
Selected papers may be developed for publication in The Journal of Somaesthetics (https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/JOS) or in an edited book based in part on the conference papers and published in the series Studies in Somaesthetics (http://www.brill.com/studies-somaesthetics).
The conference program is now available. To view, please click here.
A comprehensive list of our 2017 conference presenters and abstracts may be viewed by following this link.
You may read the official press release by following this link.
There is no conference registration fee, however, advanced registration is advised. To register or for more information, please send an email to bodymindculture@fau.edu.
For information regarding hotel accommodations, directions to the FAU campus, and other information, please click here for more information.
Any other conference inquiries should be directed to bodymindculture@fau.edu.