Professor Meredith Jones – Director Institute of Communities and Society

Professor Christina Victor – Director Institute of Health, Medicine and Environments

Spotlights on some of the highlight activities across the conference.

• Laura Agustin, the Naked Anthropologist: Guided tour – ‘Bodies in a Medieval Church’ (Tuesday & Wednesday)
• Leigh Jerome, Relational Space: ‘Transdisciplinarity as a Power’ (Wednesday)
• Catrine Val: ‘Clockwork Bodies’ (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday)

11.15  Conversational panel on Maternal Bodies: Ambivalence, possibility, and power 
Featuring Claire Lynch, Rebecca Pizzey, Helen Williams 

12:00  Q&A – all presenters

11.15 - Exploring older women's embodied self-representations through photography: A therapist’s perspective  |  Silvia Piol

11.30 - Sick, White and Famous: Remembering the (colonial) author body– or, Robert Louis Stevenson in Three Portraits

Alice Chapman-Kelly

11.45 - Rethinking cancerous bodies through Jo Spence's practice of photo-fantasy

Lizzie Merrill

12:00  Q&A – all presenters

11.15 - Bodies in Anthropological Intentions of Colonial Photography: Portman's archive of "Typical Heads of Andamanese"

Ramsha Rizwan

11.30 - Disembodying Discourses and Embodied Practices: cinemagoing audiences in Colonial India and Post-Colonial Pakistan

Shehram Mokhtar

11.45 - Visualizing the Datasphere: Representations of Old Bodies and their Data in Promotional Images of Smart Sensor Technologies for Ageing at Home

Wendy Martin

12:00  Q&A – all presenters

“Angels without knees, mermaids with two tails and Margaret of Antioch in the dragon’s belly: Bodies in a medieval church”

Laura will be taking small groups to a medieval church in Uxbridge. Please note that this will include a short bus trip, for which you will need a credit/debit card or an oyster card.

Limited numbers, registration essential. Please enquire at the main registration desk

Dr Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist

Laura Agustín is a cultural historian and walking-tour guide in London, long known as The Naked Anthropologist. Her 2007 book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry changed the global conversation on trafficking in women by putting the lived experiences of migrant women in the foreground. Explaining how women might prefer sex work to being a maid caused all manner of hell to break loose, and Laura hopes her walking tours will also blast to bits a few stereotypes, as she tells histories omitted from the canon by focusing on Gender, Sex and Class. This has included walks on mistresses, maids, navvies, actresses, sex workers, sailors and the 14th-century proletariat in locations all over London. The wealthy, aristocracy and monarchy shine by their absence. 

At the conference she’ll lead a walk in Uxbridge that relates mainstream historical events to actual places and the ordinary people who lived them in their material bodies. Topics include a woman who outlived 3 husbands, camp followers to the army who served as laundresses and prostitutes, a wonderful pile of skulls and a monster of a building.

More info at www.lauraagustin.com

 

'Lying Down' by Cressida J. Heyes, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy University of Alberta, Canada

Chaired by Professor Meredith Jones

Prof Cressida J. Heyes

Cressida J. Heyes is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy and holds a Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, Canada.

They are the author of three monographs, including Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2007), and, most recently, Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 David Easton Prize from the American Political Science Association. Dr. Heyes has been working for some years, very slowly, on a book about sleep and gender, called Sleep is the New Sex.

More info at cressidaheyes.com

14.30 - Searching for an Absent Citizen: The unmasked truth

Ashwathi Soman

14.45 - Following your desire? Exploring the embodied experiences of Orgasmic Meditation practitioners

Katy Pilcher

15:00 - ‘I did not go hungry even though I hungered for so much’: Roxane Gay’s Hunger (2017) and a creative analysis of (bodily) hunger

Rebecca Pizzey

15:00 - Problematizing “Mentally Ill Teachers” in Okinawa/Japan: Bodies, resistance, and desire

 Yuko Ida

15.15 - Q&A – all presenters

14.30 - “because the stomach is offended”: Ingestion, expulsion and vertigo as embodied crisis.

Anindya Raychaudhuri

14.45 - Re-embodiment as Radical Collective Practice: a proposition

Jo Winning

15:00 - Pain, Power, Perversion: The Tortured Body in Orwell’s 1984

Réka Törzsök

15:15 - Q&A – all presenters

14.30 - Pleasure and Pain: the animated body in short form gag cartoons

Caroline Ruddell

14.50 - J’ai perdu mon corps: migration as psychosis in animation

Jon Hackett

15.10 - Revolting Transformations: uncanny bodies in stop motion

Ayden Lamb

15.30 - Q&A – all presenters

14.30 - Enemies,Yokels,and Uglies: The transformation of the meaning of an overbite

Maxine Craig

14.45 - Guardians of beauty: An exploration of cosmetic practitioners’ experiences of constructing (desirable) bodies through non-surgical procedures

Rebecca Nash, Anne- Mette Hermans

15:00 - Educated Dolls: How Digital Beauty Communities Impact Cosmetic Surgery Education and Decision-Making Among Female Consumers

Marija Geiger Zeman, Mirela Holy, Zdenko Zeman

15.15 - Give voice to your pain and tell us your story: critical analysis of media narrative about unwanted consequences of cosmetic surgery

Tokoni Uti

15.30 - Q&A – all presenters

16:00 - Women's bodies, "toxic legacy of infertility" and right to be child-free: critical analysis of media representation of childlessness celebrities

Mirela Holy & Marija Geiger Zeman

16.15 - Narrating the unnarratable: Queer pregnancy, maternity and embodiment in femslash fanfiction

Alice Chapman-Kelly

16.30 - The Business of Fertility Commodification: Reviewing wombs for rent through the lens of feminist hedonic jurisprudence

Pin Lean Lau

16.45 - Q&A – all presenters

16:00 - Embodied research of sports in political and post-social movement spaces

Kylie Chiu Yee Lui

16:15 - Imperfection of the perfect body: A psychoanalytic exploration of the female gymnast’s body

Klaudia Wittmann

16:30 - Discipline and Freedom: Thinking decolonization politics in Hong Kong through street workout

Maggie Leung

16:45 - Visualizing the Datasphere: Representations of Old Bodies and their Data in Promotional Images of Smart Sensor Technologies for Ageing at Home

Wendy Martin

17:00 - Q&A – all presenters

16:00 - Bewitching Bodies in the Dionysiaca

Max Hallam

16:15 - Khutwasa as Therapy: Spirits, multiple selves and unbounded bodies in South Africa

Isak Niehaus

16:30 - A Literal or A Non-Literal Futurology? The bringing back of cosmism, our loved ones and our heroes

Lawrence Reilly

16:45 - Q&A – all presenters

‘POTENCIA OF BODIES IN EXIGENCIES: A GENEALOGY OF PERFORMATIVE PROTEST IN INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA’ 

Brahma Prakash Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Dr Brahma Prakash

Brahma Prakash is a writer, cultural theorist and an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is a scholar of South Asian folk culture and performance traditions. His research intersects ritual, performance and festival studies in relation to the questions of marginality, aesthetics and cultural and ecological justice.

He is the author of critically acclaimed book, Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (LeftWord 2023). He was a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from the Performance Studies International in 2013. He was a fellow at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany (2021) and the Centre for the Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University, UK (2018-19). 

More info here.