[csaa-forum] CFP: Bodily (Trans) formations: Somatechnics Conference

[Samantha Murray]

CFP DEADLINE: January 5th 2007

Somatechnics: Bodily (Trans)formations Conference 2007

April 19th-21st 2007
Carlton Crest Hotel
Sydney
Australia

'Somatechnics' is a newly coined term used to highlight the inextricability
and mutually co-constitutive nature of bodies and ‘technologies’ (in the
broadest sense of the term), of soma and techne. 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, hosted by the Department of Critical and
Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, to be held in 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) (see: www.ccs.mq.edu.au/bodmod ).


Possible topics include:

Technologies of gender/race/class/etc
Body modification/sculpting
Medical technologies
Enhancement technologies
Transgender practices and procedures
genital surgeries
Cosmetic/reconstructive surgeries
Obesity, anorexia, and/or other body ‘pathologies’
Cyborgs
Nanotechnology
Euthanasia
ageing
Reproductive technologies
Transplant technologies
BIID and other 'pathologies'
reproduction
population control
Disability
Incarceration
Racialization
Torture
Terrorism
'harm'
War
Sport
Performance art
Visual art
Religious rituals
Multi-media technologies
Sense culture


Abstracts (of no more than 500 words) should be sent, as email attachments,
to:
nikki.sullivan at scmp.mq.edu.au AND smurray at unwired.com.au no later that 5th
January 2007.


Further information

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

Conference Website: http://www.somatechnics.org/conference

Contact Email: nikki.sullivan at scmp.mq.edu.au