The Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health, in collaboration with RIKK – The Center for Women‘s and Gender Research at the University of Iceland and EDDA – Center of Excellence at the University of Iceland, will host the international conference titled “Bodies in Crisis”. The conference will take place at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik on 2-4 November 2011. Click here to view the conference draft programme.
The body has become a veritable hot spot in contemporary theorizing that forcefully disrupts given disciplinary identities and fields of investigation. Bodies make themselves present at the very core of a range of different phenomena, such as emotions, desires, identity, and agency. Resisting rigid dichotomies and categories, the materiality of bodies sticks to our thinking in not always comfortable ways, and their singularities question the very possibility of retaining stability in generalizing notions and frameworks of thinking. The field of feminist thinking on the body and materiality has a long history. We might even say that the body has always figured in one way or another into the field of feminist theory and that contemporary understandings of the body have been directly or indirectly shaped by this field. From discussions of motherhood, pregnancy and abortion, of pleasure and sex, of eating disorders and the incorporation of disciplinary regimes to theoretical discussions of embodiment and individuation of bodies, feminist thinkers have played a key role in forming different ideas and understandings of the body in numerous areas.
To register for the conference please write an email to Sveinn Máni Jóhannesson (smj7@hi.is) at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Iceland. There is a conference fee of 7900 ISK (50 EUR), with a reduced fee of 6400 (40 EUR) for students. Kindly consult the conference website for further information on registration and payment of the conference fee. The deadline for registration is October 15.
With the conference Bodies in Crisis we turn attention to a range of different ways in which bodies are brought to presence in times of crisis and bring times and states of crisis to presence, are lived in crisis and are produced and normalized as being in crisis. The conference highlights topics such as bodily integrity, representations and discourses of bodies in crisis, violence and trauma, body weight, organ donation, stigmatization of bodies in crisis, self-injury, sexual health perspectives, reproductive technologies.
The Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health is based at the Centre for Gender Research (Centrum för genusvetenskap) at Uppsala University, Sweden and had its first network meeting in January 2008. With the aim of achieving productive interdisciplinary work on issues concerning gender, body, and health, the network gathers researchers and practitioners from a number of diverse fields such as medicine, comparative literature, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, cultural geography, sports- and health sciences, psychiatry, social psychology, and history of science.
For more information, please contact the network coordinator Lisa Folkmarson Käll at body@gender.uu.se or Hildur Fjóla Antonsdóttir at rikk@hi.is