If a Body Meet a Body: Making People in Daily Practice

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Social studies of science and technology have paid much attention to the material practices that act upon and interact with the body in prominent technoscientific areas such as medical institutions (Foucault, 1963; Mol, 2002), statistical records (Hacking, 1985), information and communication technology (Balsamo, 1996; Haraway, 1991), medical operations (Hirschauer, 1991; Prentice, 2012), and genetic testing (Nelson, 2016). Far less interest has been directed towards less visible and more quotidian forms of bodywork: how bodies are produced and enacted in smaller scale interactions, and how such bodies travel between, or communicate between, various organisational structures beyond the clinic, the lab, or the nation-state.

This track invites papers on how bodies are made, changed, experienced, maintained, resisted, and unmade through mundane technoscientific practices. We welcome papers, films, performances, and other formats that address ideas relating to, but not limited to, how bodies are audio-visually mediated, digitally or physically modelled, mimicked, reproduced, categorised and mapped (across a variety material practices and forms of knowing) and what the effects are of such practices on conceptions of the embodied self, subjectivity, and social identity. In addition, we invite presentations engaging with commonplace body techniques such as (un)dressing, gesturing, posing, and walking, and how such actions contribute to the establishment and potential subversion of social norms and identities.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / If a body meet a body: making people in daily practice

Discussant

• Trevor John Pinch, Cornell University

Individual Presentations

• Nobody Knows What a Body Can Do: un/making the mediated body - Scott East, UNSW Sydney; Karen Kriss Karen Kriss, UNSW Sydney Art & Design

• Reinventing the Heel: Technoscientific Interventions in Fashion Footwear - Chris Hesselbein, Cornell University STS

• Tearoom Trade: Buildings, Bodies, Sex - Janice M. Irvine, University of Massachusetts

• Who’s Listening? Practices of social justice listening within an advocacy coalition for policy change around hearing and deafness - Nicole Matthews, Macquarie University; Justine Lloyd, Macquarie University

• You Ain’t Nothin But a ___: Modelling, Manufacturing, Standardising, and Enacting Elvis Presley in Regional NSW - Sahar Tavakoli, Cornell University STS

Session Organizers

• Chris Hesselbein, Cornell University STS

• Sahar Tavakoli, Cornell University STS