Corporeal Techniques and Technologies
Techne, the ancient Greek term for art, artifice, craft, and skill, broadly designates systems, methods, practices and techniques of making or doing. Often translated as “know-how,” it locates knowledge production in corporeal techniques and technologies and helps us to think beyond cognitive, epistemological and disciplinary models grounded in mind-body dualisms. A wide range of scholarship across the disciplines deploys techneas a methodological tool to explore the cultural and historical manifestations, transformations and extensions of bodymind through techniques and technologies, including “techniques of the body” (Mauss), “habitus” (Bourdieu), the “history of manners” (Elias), “enskillment” (Ingold), ecological and technological “affordances” (Gibson), “bodily technologies” (Downey), the gendered and racialized body as a “cyborg” (Haraway) or “archive” (Fuentes), and “distributed cognitive ecologies” (Tribble) that extend across boundaries of brain, body, systems, instruments, objects, and material practices. This semester, we trace the past, present, and potential futures of our biotechnological age, and the new forms of post-human technicity prompting us to rethink the shifting boundaries of human and non-human embodiment, what counts as a “body,” how bodies make, move, act, feel, perceive, communicate, record, etc., as well as new forms of bodily inscription, modification, prosthesis, distribution and extension.
Lectures
All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted, and are held in the Daniel Family Commons, which is located in the Usdan University Center.
Form(s of) Listening from Edison to Muzak and Beyond
09/24/2018
ALEXANDRA HUI • Mississippi State University
Figuring the Climate Refugee: Precarity, Adaptation, and Risk in Representations of Environmental Migration
10/01/2018
NEEL AHUJA • University of California, Santa Cruz
Something about Nothing
10/8/2018
MEL CHEN • University of California, Berkeley
Oceanic Feelings in the Anthropocene: Ellen Gallagher’s Rising (Black) Atlantic
10/15/2018
HEATHER VERMEULEN • Andrew Mellon Post-Doc Wesleyan
Hearing Changes
10/29/2018
RON KUIVILA • Wesleyan University
Embodied Engineering: Gender, Technology, and Body Politics in Mali (West Africa)
11/05/2018
LAURA ANN TWAGIRA • Wesleyan University
The Children’s Hatchery: On the Nonhuman Origins of Neonatology
11/12/2018
MEGAN GLICK • Wesleyan University
Skin, Touching, Skin: Disability, Touch, and Radical Interdependence
11/19/2018
CHRISTINA CROSBY • Wesleyan University
Refuse Bodies and the Technologies of Waste Production in the Transatlantic Slave Trade
11/26/2018
MARISA FUENTES • Rutgers University
After Crip, Beyond Disability
12/3/2018
ALISON KAFER • Southwestern University