CFP: (De)Parsing Bodies

Following the recent success of The Body: Exploring Culture and Research, a postgraduate conference sponsored by the British Sociological Association and held at the University of Kent, we are calling for contributions for a future issue of Skepsi: the online interdisciplinary research journal, run by postgraduate students of the University of Kent and now in its fourth year.

In an effort to capture and expand upon this momentum, we are seeking to gather ideas, explorations, critiques and experiments that examine this interdisciplinary topic. Studying the body takes many forms. We believe in a rhizomatic approach that combines a variety of perspectives and thus welcome traditional and non-traditional approaches; include theoretical, empirical and artistic works. We therefore welcome submissions in the form of traditional articles, poetry, visual art, etc. Questions in which we are interested include: What is the body? What are bodies? What are the consequences of the body entering into political techniques? How do life sciences impact on our understanding of the body/bodies? What does the posthumanist body feel like? What is the role of embodiment in performance making and doing? How important is identity in relation to bodies? How much power do the media have in shaping relationships to bodies? How important are spatial and geographical considerations to daily experiences of the body?

Potential Topics Include:

• Biopolitics
  
• Queer theory
  
• Life sciences
  
• Performance making
  
• Bodies in motion
  
• Material feminisms
  
• Trans identities
  
• Gender and sexuality
  
• Representations of the body
  
• The body in space

Submissions are invited from academic staff, postgraduate students and independent scholars. Any of the submitted articles selected by the Editorial Board after peer review will be published in a forth-coming issue of the journal, in Winter 2012. Articles, which should not exceed 5,000 words, should be sent, together with an abstract of about 250 words and brief biographical details about the author, to: [email protected].

The deadline for submission of articles is 15 February 2012