[Sci-tech-public] Fri., Feb. 11 Sensing the Unseen @ MIT - "The Invisible: Feeling"

[Amberly Steward]

Please join us this Friday, February 11 for a new session of Sensing the
Unseen, a seminar series to discuss current scholarship on the sensory and
media modes that people employ to access realms of existence and experience
outside the immediately visible. 




All seminar meetings are free and open to the public - no registration is
required. 

The Invisible: Feeling <http://web.mit.edu/unseen/species/invisible.html> 
Friday, February 11, 2:30 - 5:00 PM  
@ MIT 56-114 (Whitaker Building #56 <http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=56> , Room
114)

Speakers: Thomas Csordas (University of California San Diego) and Kathryn
Geurts (Hamline University)

Discussants: Byron Good (Harvard University) and Robert Desjarlais (Sarah
Lawrence) 

 

Thomas Csordas Invisible Illnesses and Embodiment as a Methodological Field

As a locus of research in anthropology and the human sciences, embodiment
can be understood as an indeterminate methodological field defined by
perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world. In
this paper I outline three dimensions of this field, including a system of
elementary structures of agency in the body-world relation, a fundamental
axis of sexual difference between male and female and the variations along
that axis, and a set of components of corporeality which allows us to
identify and isolate strategic research materials for empirical study. I
then flesh in this outline by examining three unseen or invisible illnesses
phantom limb, chronic fatigue, and chemical sensitivity each of which
occupies a distinctive position within embodiment as a methodological field.

 

 

Kathryn Geurts Disability Sensibilities in Ghana: Feeling Invisible, Feeling
Empowered

Invisibility is palpable for citizens of Accra living with disability. You
are alternately passed by, ignored, or stared at so intensely that you
experience your self as an object. This paper will draw on interviews and
participant observation with Ghanaian activists to explore how the unseen
(here: bodily, emotional feeling) operates as a vector for cultivating
disability sensibilities that trouble and transcend distinctions
consistently made between rich/poor, outsider/insider, able-bodied/disabled,
and the individual good compared to collective well-being.

 

Kathryn Linn Geurts is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hamline
University and in 2009 was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She
is the author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an
African Community.

 

.
A Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures to be held at MIT in
2010-2011, Sensing the Unseen is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
and hosted by MIT Anthropology. Our website provides more details, including
upcoming seminars:  http://web.mit.edu/unseen/ 

Maps & directions to the Sensing the Unseen seminar can be found here:
http://web.mit.edu/unseen/directions.html
Sign up to receive email reminders about upcoming seminars:
https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/unseen_list

 



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