Keynote speakers and conference highlights

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.

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.

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).

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s research examines experiences of and responses to conflict-induced displacement, with a particular focus on diverse forms of Southern-led responses to displacement and a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She has conducted extensive research in refugee camps and urban areas including in Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, France, Jordan, Lebanon, South Africa, Syria, Sweden, and the UK.

Elena is currently the PI of a multi-sited project funded by the European Research Council, South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. She is author of The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival (Syracuse University Press, 2014), South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development: Views from the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East, (Routledge, 2015, paperback published in 2017), and editor of Refuge in a Moving World: Refugee and migrant journeys across disciplines (UCL Press, 2020 - Open Access). 

Relational Space is a non-profit gallery that facilitates intersectional collaboration amongst artists, scientists, policy-makers and community activists. They address intractable social issues by blending knowledge sets and co-curating immersive installations to build a more just and sustainable world, inspired through art and informed by truth. 

At (Inter)Disciplinary Bodies, Relational Space will facilitate inclusive collaborations between scientists and artists to co-curate an immersive exhibition that encapsulates the breadth of 'bodies' in the conference programme.

Catrine Val is an international conceptual artist specializing in photography, film, and performance. With a deep interest in the concepts of time and history, she focuses on the role of women within diverse cultural and political systems, as well as their contributions to the field of philosophy.

At (Inter)Disciplinary Bodies, Catrine Val will perform 'Clockwork Bodies' with interventions on campus throughout the conference programme.