Merleau-Ponty and Embodiment: Between the Cognitive, Aesthetic, and Socio-Political

47TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL MERLEAU-PONTY CIRCLE

Dec 4th – Dec 6th 2023 | Deakin University, Melbourne/Naarm, Australia | Hybrid; in-person (Deakin Downtown) and virtual (AEDT)

“Le corps est notre moyen général d’avoir un monde. / The body is our general means of having a world.”

Merleau-Ponty’s seminal work on embodiment has been of enduring interest and influence in a wide range of fields. It has, for example, played a significant role in research on embodied cognition and enactivism, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, affectivity, movement, art, place, and more. Although sometimes criticised for providing an account of embodiment that is too general, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical foregrounding of embodiment has also facilitated critical phenomenological studies attending to the specificities of how particular bodies inhabit social and political environments, through considerations of race, gender, disability, ageing, and illness.

This year’s meeting of the IMPC seeks to bring together these rich and varied strands of enquiry, in order to think with, against, and beyond Merleau-Ponty’s own contributions on the lived body. Alongside the general program, this year’s conference will also include a thematic stream on Rethinking Racism through Embodiment and Place curated by Dr Helen Ngo.

Keynote speakers:

• Professor Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis, University of Wollongong)
• Associate Professor Alia Al-Saji (McGill University)

Invited speakers:

• Associate Professor Kym Maclaren (Toronto Metropolitan University)
• Professor Claude Romano (Paris-Sorbonne University)
• Assistant Professor Joel Michael Reynolds (Georgetown University)

Conference program:

• Provisional conference schedule
• Abstracts and presenter bios for the general program
• Abstracts and presenter bios for the thematic stream on racism

An updated schedule and program booklet will be emailed out to attendees closer to the conference date.