[csaa-forum] Somatechnics Seminar Series Invitation - Wednesday 22nd March

[Jessica Cadwallader]

Hi all,

The Somatechnics Seminar Series is Macquarie's Department of Critical and Cultural Studies research seminar series. The invitation extends to all.  Please circulate the attached file/this email around your departments, internal and external email lists, colleagues and so on, to all you think would be interested.

Somatechnics Seminar Series
Corpographies: Bodies in Question
Seminar One: Touching Bodies

Speakers: Anne Cranny-Francis (CCS); Elaine Laforteza (CCS); Mark Paterson
(UWE)
Date/Time: 22 March, 3.00-5.00pm
Venue: Bldg W6A Rm 820, Macquarie University

Abstracts:

Anne Cranny-Francis: ³The Midas Touch.²

I¹m writing this at the very beginning of a project that seeks to understand
the biopolitics of touch - a political and cultural reading of the sense of
touch that can be used to evaluate the significance and/or enhance the
effectiveness of new touch (haptic) technologies.  In this paper I map my
preliminary understandings of touch as a cultural practice, not simply an
individual or idiosyncratic sensation.  This includes a re-positioning of
touch from its lowly status on the scale of the senses, where it has long
been considered inferior to senses such as sight and hearing.

Associate Professor Anne Cranny-Francis is Head of the Department of
Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University.

 
Elaine Laforteza: "Touching Skins: The Whitening of Brown Skins and the
Darkening of Whiteness.²

Racialising practices work to show that skin colour reveals a person's
subjective capacities, geo-political position and socio-economic status.
This paper tracks the ways in which such racialising systems are
(re)conceptualised through non-surgical skin-bleaching.  I focus on some
Filipinos' use of skin-bleaching lotions and soaps.  For this, I divide the
paper into three sections.  The first maps how Spanish and North American
control of the Philippines fostered an aesthetic hierarchy that privileges
whiteness.  The second part complicates the cohesiveness of white identity
by showing that "non-whites" performatively enact whiteness through
skin-bleaching.  In the third section, the indeterminacy of skin lends
itself as a tenuous means of totalising subject positions. Ultimately, this
paper articulates how people touch their own skins and bodies to be in touch
with other bodies, ideologies and geopolitical positions.

Elaine Laforteza is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Critical and
Cultural Studies, Macquarie University.

 

 

Mark Paterson: "Tangible Play, Prosthetic Performance."

Tangible play considers how various senses of touch are employed in some
digital art installations and performances. I will examine case studies of
digital artists who variously play with the notions of skin, of flesh, and
then of body; and how they unfold, the one into the other. The case studies
explore, firstly, the cutaneous touch of the skin, being used as a play of
presence at a distance; secondly, the mutability of flesh, and visceral
touch; and thirdly, the exploration of the aesthetic body through a
multisensory virtual environment, altering perception of body schema and the
spatial apprehension of 'inside' and 'outside'.

 

Dr. Mark Paterson is a Lecturer in Philosophy & Cultural Studies,

University of the West of England.

 
Thanks very much - we look forward to seeing you there!

Jess


Jess Cadwallader
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Critical and Cultural Studies
Macquarie University
North Ryde 2109

Jess Cadwallader
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Critical and Cultural Studies
Macquarie University
North Ryde 2109

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