Minding the body

Minding the Body: Dualism and Its Discontents

http://mindingthebodyconference.wordpress.com/about-the-conference/call-for-papers/

Thursday, February 28 – March 1, 2013
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue (34th Street & 5th Ave.)
New York, NY 10016

All conference events are free of charge and there is no conference registration fee. All are welcome.

“Minding the Body” is an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the English Student Association in the English program at The Graduate Center (CUNY). This conference will include work by graduate students that considers theoretical perspectives and scholarship that explores the mind-body problem via wide range of disciplines, including the humanities (literary studies, philosophy, and visual arts), the social sciences, technology and media studies, neuroscience, medicine, psychology, and cognitive science. Intersections between recent theoretical currents, including theories of mind and consciousness, ideas about emotions and affect, and the relationship between neuroscientific findings and understandings of embodiment, will be explored.
Please email 250-500 word abstracts by January 14, 2013

We invite proposals in other media as well. Please send a proposal of 250-500 words as well as display requirements.

Email: mindingthebodyconference@gmail.com

The turn towards the influence of affect and emotions on “rational decision making”—the false separation between mind and body that neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls “Descartes’ Error”—has had wide appeal in recent years in the humanities and other fields. This conference intends to explore the theoretical frontiers of interdisciplinary scholarship that addresses the mind-body problem. How
can we continue to think about mind-body relations, connections, or disruptions in new ways across disciplinary boundaries? How can recent work in the humanities on affect and emotions speak to other fields?
What are the limitations of theories of affect? What might neuroscience offer to other disciplines for thinking about mind, consciousness, and embodiment? How can we consider the recent explosion of interest and attention—enthusiastic to bleak—on the possible effects that the Internet, technology, and increasingly digital lives are having on the connections or fractures between mind, body, and identity? How might we theorize mind and body in other ways—inter-personally, inter-subjectively, trans-personally, ethically—in material, social, and  digital ways?

We invite interdisciplinary approaches to rethinking Cartesian dualism, including forms of dialogue between, but not limited to, neuroscience, affect theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, medicine, technology studies, cybernetics, and cognitive science. We encourage interrogation of disciplinary boundaries or interdisciplinary perspectives. Papers might be literary and humanities focused, or might also consider other perspectives on mind and body from the sciences, visual arts, philosophy, social sciences, and digital studies. We solicit, and would like to include, the widest possible range of approaches to ways of thinking about “minding the body” in all literary fields: pre-digital, pre-neuroscientic, pre-psychoanalytic, phenomenological, aesthetic, cognitive, historical, experimental, and in or about other media.

Possible conference papers might consider but are not limited to:

Neuroscience: neuroscience and emotions; theories of consciousness; brain-based epistemology; plasticity; mirror neurons; reading the brain–neuroimaging and mapping; neuroesthetics

Fiction and Reading: novelizing the body; the novel as body, the body as  novel; identification (possibilities for and limitations or problems with); reading and theory of mind

Digital Revolution: the brain on the Internet; virtual bodies—avatars, learning to use new bodies; virtual death; online immortality; consciousness and connectivity; thinking and attention; emotions, empathy, and robots/androids with feelings; outsourcing memory; simulation and specialization; games and multiple lives, bodies, and narratives; networked bodies, distributed mind, and affect transference;
ambient intimacy; multimodal pedagogy and learning (embodiment, experience, agency); nostalgia for the body; interfaces, usability, and interactivity; war and digital technology; global consciousness,
collective intelligence, synchronization of mind; humanism and posthumanism; Turing Test; artificial intelligence; technology and the environment; synthetics/robotics; history of technology and extension of  mind or body

Psychoanalysis: the Freudian body; bodies on the couch; psychoanalysis after Freud; object relations; attachment theory and self-other differentiation; inter-subjective and relational perspectives; forms of
listening; mindfulness; recognition; objectification; drifting attention; impersonal intimacy (Leo Bersani); the “cure;” melancholia, productive malaise, and happiness studies; resiliency; dissociation,
detachment, depression; trauma and PTSD; neuropsychology;
neuropsychoanalysis

Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives: theories of affect and emotions; process philosophy and empiricism (James, Bergson, Whitehead); emergence and evolution; philosophy of mind, boundaries, and embodiment; cybernetics (Tomkins, Bateson, Hayles);  Eve Sedgwick and her work on affect, analysis, Tomkins, and the body; ghost in the machine; empiricism and consciousness; mind extension; body schema and body image; materialism and dualism/non-dualism; zombies; thinking or locating souls (feedback loops)

Non-western Perspectives: on mind-body connections, illness, or therapy; Buddhism and “thoughts without a thinker;” active-passive bodies and non-dualism

Isolated bodies: memoir/narrative accounts of bodies in retreat, in seclusion, in incarceration; thinking and silence

Medicine/Medical: memoir, autobiography, and the body; writing the embodied self; illness; narrative and neuroscience; pharmacology/better living through chemistry; locked-in syndrome; addiction(s); chart histories (multiple narratives); pain management (or, tell me where it hurts); attention and listening–good doctor/bad doctor; being a patient, “difficult” patients; bioethics; contact, empathy, or identification; the communicating body–how the body speaks; body-relatedness; healing; transfusions and transplants—organs and faces; plastic surgery and body modification; cutting to cure; trauma and the body—wounded bodies/minds; neuronal rewiring; artificial limbs; psychosomatic symptoms;
hypochondria; body dysmorphia; scars; phantom limb syndrome; memory disruption/degenerative disorders; narrative, memory and the body; twins, triplets…octuplets; conjoined twins

Sex, Sexuality, Gender: trans-bodies; gender reassignment; desiring bodies; boundaries; perversion and projection; sadism and masochism; obsessions and fetishes; fetish gear or practice; voyeurism and
exhibitionism; technology—sexuality, gender identification, identity.

Performance and Collaboration: art practices–identification or unification with other(s) through performance or surgical procedure; performance art and endurance, pain, boredom, stillness, slowness; form and incoherency: non-verbal forms of representation or work on mind/embodiment in other media, including visual and performing arts; literary experimentation–the “cut up” (Burroughs, Gysin and the “Third Mind”), etc.

Physical Research: somatic disciplines (Alexander, ideokinesis, Feldenkreis, Body Mind Centering, etc.), durational performance, experiential anatomy, experiential/embodied pedagogies.

Early Modern Bodies: earlier perspectives–thinking about the mind-body problem: before the Internet; before pacemakers; before Freud; before Darwin; before vaccination; before the microscope; historian Roy Porter’s work on the “modern foundations of body and soul” and histories of medicine and madness

Other: disciplinary boundaries; the imagination and the body; body politic, collective minds, loss of mind, group identification (sports, cults, and communes; the Borg); Dick Cheney has a new heart, etc.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact one of the conference co-chairs, Jason Nielsen or Judd Staley, at mindingthebodyconference@gmail.com