Conference: "Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging Publics
and Pedagogies"
November 19-20, 2010
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Conference Co-Chairs:
Sarah Brophy, Associate Professor, Department of English and Cultural
Studies, McMaster University
Janice Hladki, Associate Professor, School of the Arts, McMaster University
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 15, 2010
CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION:
This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore how visual cultural
practices image and imagine unruly bodies and, in so doing, respond to
Patricia Zimmermann's call for "radical media democracies that animate
contentious public spheres" (2000, p. xx). Our aim is to explore how
health, disability, and the body are theorized, materialized, and
politicized in forms of visual culture including photography, video art,
graphic memoir, film, body art and performance, and digital media.
Accordingly, we invite proposals for individual papers and roundtables
that consider how contemporary visual culture makes bodies political in
ways that matter for the future of democracy. Proposals may draw on
fields such as: visual culture, critical theory, disability studies,
health studies, science studies, autobiography studies, indigenous
studies, feminisms, queer studies, and globalization/transnationalism.
CONFERENCE EVENTS:
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
*Rebecca Belmore,* internationally recognized Anishinabekwe artist,
Vancouver (exhibitions of her performance, video, installation, and
sculpture include: Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Brooklyn Museum of
Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts);
*Lisa Cartwright,* Professor of Communication and Science Studies and
Affiliated Faculty in Gender Studies, Department of Communication,
University of California, San Diego (/Screening the Body: Tracing
Medicine's Visual Culture/; /Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice
and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child/)
*Robert McRuer,* Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of English,
George Washington University, Washington, DC (/Crip Theory: Cultural
Signs of Queerness and Disability/; /The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary
American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities/);
*Ato Quayson,* Professor of English and Director of the Centre for
Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto (/Aesthetic
Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation/; /Relocating
Postcolonialism/).
The conference will also feature /Scrapes: Unruly Embodiments in Video
Art,/ an exhibition curated by Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki, at the
McMaster Museum of Art.
POSSIBLE THEMATICS:
1. Technologies
-- medical technologies (e.g. medical imaging, drug therapies,
prosthetics and other devices) and their implications for embodiment,
subjectivity, community, kinship, and politics
-- corporeality and the senses as sites/forms of knowledge-making
-- biopolitics and surveillance
-- the relationship between "old" and "new" technologies
-- how technologies mediate social spaces of embodiment and interaction
-- interrogations of the human and posthuman in medicine, science, and art
2. Cultural Production
-- cultural pedagogy; the production of knowledge in sites of cultural
production (e.g. galleries, festivals, classrooms, online, etc.)
-- counter-publics (e.g. disability culture)
-- indigenous modes of cultural production
-- diasporic/transnational issues and practices
-- new representational modes (e.g. digital arts, graphic memoir)
-- documentary practices
-- "doing politics in art" (Bennett)
3. Disability
-- medical, scientific, and cultural discourses of disability
-- performing and witnessing embodied difference
-- interrogations of impairment
-- genetics, reproduction, eugenics
-- dis-ease and disorder
-- "ability trouble" (McRuer)
-- "radical crip images" (McRuer)
4. Affect
-- explorations of "ugly feelings" (Ngai), "aesthetic nervousness"
(Quayson), "moral spectatorship" (Cartwright), "empathic vision"
(Bennett), and "seeing for" (Bal)
-- relationships to medicalization, regulation, and surveillance
-- affect as generative/productive in relation to concepts of ethical
spectatorship and witnessing
-- relationships between corporeality and theorizations of nature as
dynamic and agentic (Barad, Grosz, Haraway)
-- can we/should we move beyond the theories that posit /negative/
affect as a prime site for ethics?
-- affect and global politics: representations of global mobilities,
violence, war, terrorism
HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL:
We kindly invite submissions from scholars, artists, health
professionals, community members, and activists in all areas and
disciplines.
Concurrent sessions will be 90 minutes in length. Proposals for the
following formats will be considered:
1) Individual papers: 15 minutes in length
2) Roundtables: 4-5 participants, including a designated moderator and a
plan for facilitated discussion of ideas
All submissions will be peer-reviewed.
Individual paper submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words
3) paper title and a 300-500 word abstract; the description of the
paper's content should be as specific as possible and indicate relevance
to one or more of the conference thematics.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or VHS).
Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.
Roundtable submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information for each participant
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words for each participant
3) roundtable title and a 500 word proposal. The proposal should both
indicate the relevance of the roundtable to one or more of the
conference thematics and outline the organization of the proposed
discussion.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or VHS).
Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.
All submissions should be sent via email attachment to
viscult@mcmaster.ca <mailto:viscult@mcmaster.ca> by January 15, 2010.
Please use the subject line "proposal for Health, Embodiment, and Visual
Culture." Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.
If electronic submission is not possible, please mail or fax proposals
to arrive by January 15, 2010.
Address: Sarah Brophy & Janice Hladki: Health, Embodiment, and Visual
Culture Conference
c/o Department of English & Cultural Studies
Chester New Hall 321
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L9
Fax: 905-777-8316
ACCESSIBILITY:
Presenters are encouraged to explore ways to make physical, sensory, and
intellectual access a fundamental part of their presentation.
Suggestions include: large print (18 point font) copies of handouts,
large-print copies of paper or panel outlines, and/or audio descriptions
of any film or video clips and images. Presenters are also encouraged to
consider open or closed captioning of films and video clips.
POST-CONFERENCE PUBLICATION PLANS:
Papers from the conference will be considered for a special issue of
/The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies/.
CONFERENCE SPONSORSHIP:
Sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster
University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund).
