Event overview
Most of us will at some point experience bodily engagement with, and embodied support through, a ‘biotechnology’ - broadly understood here as any technology designed to work intimately with the human body and to some degree with its embodiment. Such biotechnologies not only affect a person’s identity, but their overall sense of belonging.
So how might we experience, appreciate and understand some of these variously intimate human-technology relations, as with transplantation, prosthetics or hearing aids? What are the mimetic or animating potentialities of biotechnology? (Can Aristotle’s work on psuche and philia give us some means to acknowledge these individual experiences?) And what of innovative and convergent somatechnics?
Such experiences of medical technologies and techniques can leave one with a certain disquiet. With reference to medical phenomenology and Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, one can come to appreciate such experiences as speaking to our uncanny canniness - our bodily knowing. Thus, suggesting the clinical and ethical significance of such experiences for patients and practitioners alike, in a profession dominated by rational, evidence based practice. And how might our embodied experiences of uncanny illness, health and medicine background our ability to trust?
Looking from standard to future-present biotechnologies we see developments which treat the human body as a plastic resource ripe with potential. How might we appreciate the reasons, affects and effects of fashioning flesh? Indeed, what happens when we enter our bodies into the paradox and conundrum that is fashion? Might medicine already be caught up in the politics of fashioning bodies?
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Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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11 Mar 2009 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
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