Theme: Bodies

The CIDRAL theme for this year is Bodies.

Bodies and embodiment are at the heart of a diverse set of questions examined by researchers in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. Our research engages with themes ranging from the interconnections between objects, emotions and the body and gender and sexuality, to histories of health, disease and medicine. Across the school we share common concerns with the representation of bodies in texts, visual arts, and in cultural institutions as well as with changing relationships between bodies, selves and societies.

The current context of global political crisis and conflict has meanwhile rendered certain kinds of bodies vulnerable in new ways, prompting urgent reflection on bodily autonomy and integrity, and the care and protection of bodies under threat.

This year’s CIDRAL theme is deliberately broad, intended to both draw together researchers from across our school and open new spaces for engagement with researchers across the wider university and our cultural institutions. We invite colleagues to consider how interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborative research practices might generative new perspectives on bodies and embodiment in the past and in the contemporary world.

Starting points for our discussion include:

• Embodied knowledge, and research as embodied practice.
• Theorising the body and embodiment.
• Representing and transforming bodies.
• Bodies under threat: violence, war and climate crisis.
• Care of the body: health, disease and wellbeing.
• Bodies in motion: displacement, migration, exchange.
• Bodily afterlives: memories, meaning and contestation.
• Marginalised bodies, exclusions and inequalities.
• Bodies in protest: power, agency and resistance.