Injury and Invisibility: Empiricism and Anti-Empiricism in Knowing Damage and Regeneration - II

Abstract

How we might study that which we cannot see, count, or measure? How might we analyze invisibility? This is especially important in the context of injuries – to bodies, to infrastructures, to populations of humans and non-humans – that are either undetectable (as with minor strokes) or erased (as in political attempts to obscure events), and the aftermaths they produce, which can lead to novel connections and regenerations. In this panel, we reflect on the invisible and unknown, and invite presenters to explore other ways of knowing injuries. We aim to move beyond the typical critical social critique of scientific evidence -- that is, accusations of marginalized evidence -- to consider how we might approach the invisible? Fantasies, delusions, visions -- each is marked by its intimacy and inexpressibility. But might we make them social? We seek to go beyond an inventory of exclusions to consider the invisible, that which we don’t know, and which nonetheless lingers in its effects. We consider other types of evidence, and how novel approaches to evidence might provide ways for articulating anti-epistemologies that destabilize ways of knowing – for scholars as well as our interlocutors. Not simply stating its absence, but asking how we might bring it into focus, make it visible and readable, to include the excluded, as a means to counter what we know, or what think we know, about evidence, interiority, and relationality. How might we interrupt conventional renderings of the injured? How can we render the unknowable knowable for invisible trauma and damaged states?

Chair

• Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Binghamton University

Discussant

• Theresa MacPhail, Stevens Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• A Time Atelier (Art, Neuroscience, and Time Slippage) - denielle a elliott, York University

• The Elusive Dolorimeter: Trials and Tribulations in Measuring Phantom Limb Pain - Alexandra Middleton, Princeton University

• Being Gutless - Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Binghamton University

• CTE Meets #metoo: Violence and Victimhood Reconsidered in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy - Aryn Martin, York University

Session Organizer

• denielle a elliott, York University