This conference considers how the expressive, experiential terrain of the body meets, interrogates and re-calibrates our understanding of on-going questions of agency, action, and subjectivity in order to attend to the various ways in which bodies tell their own stories at the intersections of arts, activism and scholarship.
If we consider the body as the material and everyday locus of socio-political power, manifest either as repressive control or expressive agency, how might we engage in new ways of re-thinking old problems through arts practice and research? The ever-more prevalent neo-liberal models of delimiting all within the values of a market-economy create an ever-more pressing need to articulate the ways in which bodies can resist and restructure the seemingly unending ‘measuring’ mechanisms of control and organization, labelling and coercion of bodies en masse and as well as the internalization of individual regimes of surveillances. The body continues to be the site of both oppression and agency: while for example as we see the on-going struggle for women to have safe and legal access to reproductive rights or the individual struggles with recognition and support for bodies who fall outside of the ever-narrowing ‘norms’ of what is desirable (body size, ability, age, gender, sexuality, etc.), we also see the resilience of bodies on the move across borders (both literal and metaphorical) or playfully performing new modes of resistance or provocation.
The conference brings together scholars, performers, artists and activists to expand understandings of bodies and embodiment, to address the forgotten, elided, segregated bodies, the repressed histories of bodies. Following the Performance & Politics & Protest conference in September 2015, this event invites a further exploration of the rich interplay of diverse sites of culture, performance and activism, focusing on how bodies intervene and invent new modes of expression, disrupting smooth systems of control, resisting the ever-narrowing confines of what is acceptable, and engaging a playful sense of possibility through creative arts research.
Please join us on Sunday 19th June at University College Cork.
Venues: West Wing 6 and Aula Max, UCC
Free and open to public but please register:
Register at: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/bodystories-ucc-june-19-2016-tickets-25773881373
See also: https://performancepoliticsprotest2015.wordpress.com/
Event is supported by University College Cork:
*Drama & Theatre Studies, School of Music and Theatre (http://www.music.ucc.ie/drama/)
*Women’s Studies: https://www.ucc.ie/en/womensstudies/
*College of Arts Celtic Studies and Social Sciences: http://www.ucc.ie/en/cacsss/)
*Strategic Research Fund
Also in conjunction with Drama & Theatre Studies Postgraduate Perforum Conference Monday 20th and Tuesday 21st June
https://perforumconference.wordpress.com/
BodyStories 2016 