Somatechnics Conference

“Somatechnics” is a newly coined term used to highlight the inextricability of soma and techne, of the body (as a culturally intelligible construct) and the techniques (dispositifs and ‘hard technologies’ ) in and through which bodies are formed and transformed. This term, then, supplants the logic of the ‘and’, indicating that technes are not something we add to or apply to the body, but rather, are the means in and through which bodies are constituted, positioned, and lived.  As such, the term reflects contemporary understandings of the body as the incarnation or materialization of historically and culturally specific discourses and practices, and of activities involving bodies – in medicine, information technology, education, the arts, surveillance, science, law – as fundamentally formative and transformative, cultural and social.

Abstracts (approx 500 words) are invited for papers/performances/panels for the Somatechnics Conference to be held at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia on April 19th-21st 2007. This is the third in a series of bi-annual conferences: previous conferences were Body Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves(2003), and Body Modification Mark II (2005). Somatechnics is the inaugural conference of the Somatechnics Project, a research network whose membership is international and cross-disciplinary.

Possible topics include:

Body modification/sculpting
Performance art
Visual art
Medical technologies
Enhancement technologies
Religious rituals
Multi-media technologies
Transgender practices and procedures
Cosmetic/reconstructive surgeries
Obesity, anorexia, and/or other body ‘pathologies’
Cyborgs
Nanotechnology
Euthanasia
Reproductive technologies
Transplant technologies
Incarceration
Racialization
Torture, terrorism
Sport
Technologies of gender/race/class/etc

Abstracts (of no more than 500 words) should be sent, as email attachments, to:nikki.sullivan@scmp.mq.edu.au

Further information

Nikki Sullivan
Department of Critical and Cultural Studies
Macquarie University
North Ryde
New South Wales 2109
Australia

Email: nikki.sullivan@scmp.mq.edu.au
Phone: + 61 (0)2 9850 8760

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