OPEN CALL FOR PROVOCATIONS & ROUNDTABLE on the effects of embodiment in research
Apply as a Panelist by June 28 July 2| Submit a provocation until July 10
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***OPEN CALL FOR PROVOCATIONS***
Let us begin from the premise that all knowledge is embodied. Further, all practices that generate and enact knowledge are embodied. The question then is not IF your practice/research is embodied, but rather, HOW it is embodied. What are the effects of embodiment, and conversely disembodiment, in your approach to moving, making, thinking, and sharing knowledge?
In brief, tell us: HOW is your research embodied?
We seek provocations from practitioners across the arts, sciences, and humanities, and from within and beyond academia. Provocations can take many forms – text, image, sound, video. All contributions will be posted online, and shared in the context of the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference.
Submit a provocation up until July 10 at: https://forms.gle/nhzChJp7W6pQZJpd8
If you submit by June 28 July 2, you can also indicate your interest in being a panelist for the Roundtable Discussion at the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference (see below for details).
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***OPEN CALL for PANELISTS at the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference***
Convenors: Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, & Jessica Rajko
Building from the collection of provocations posted online, we will convene a hybrid online/onsite Roundtable Discussion at the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference on July 14, 2023 from 14:30-16:30. The abstract below provides additional framing for our conversation.
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.
Please use the same form as above to submit your provocation by June 28, 2023, and tick the box to express your interest in being a panelist for the Roundtable Discussion.
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***KEY DATES***
June 28 July 2, 2023 – For Panelists
Deadline to submit a provocation if you would like to be considered as a panelist, either online or in person, for the Roundtable Discussion at the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference.
July 10, 2023 – For Online Provocations
Deadline to submit a provocation to be shared online, and considered in the context of the conference. This deadline is if you do NOT wish to be a panelist. The call will remain open indefinitely.
July 14, 2023: Roundtable Discussion
The Roundtable will take place online & onsite in Coventry on Friday July 14, from 14:30 – 16:30.
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***ABOUT***
The Provocations Project <https://www.provocations.online> involves a series of open calls for provocations meant to spur dialogue regarding differences that have come to matter within and between cultures of research in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Once launched, these calls remain open indefinitely, inviting contributions on a rolling basis to iteratively (re)configure the contours of emergent discourse. All provocations are posted online, and everyone who submits a provocation is invited to join in conversation with other provocateurs through our online community, as well as curated video conversations and roundtable discussions.
Spanning its multiple iterations since 2018, the Provocations Project aims to hold space for generative exchange around novel and systemic conditions that affect cross-disciplinary and collaborative practices. The project is not specific to any one discipline, topic, or community, and yet each question posed as part of the project becomes situated through its resonance in a particular context.
The Provocations Project is coordinated by Teoma Naccarato <https://teomanaccarato.com>, John MacCallum <https://linktr.ee/john.maccallum>, and Jessica Rajko <http://www.jessicarajko.com>, drawing on their hybrid backgrounds in contemporary dance, music, and computing, as well as performance philosophy and critical theory.