Interdisciplinary Conference
"Body Imaging and the Body Imaginary"
April 3-4 2015
Contemporary representations of the human body proliferate at an ever-increasing rate through the medium of new technologies (medical and other scientifically-oriented imaging technology, ‘new media’, contemporary art, etc.). This conference interrogates the bidirectional movement between subjective images of the body and contemporary technological possibilities of representation. We invite proposals from across the humanities and health sciences, from both academic and clinical perspectives, that explore the ways in which perceptions, identities, and knowledges and the process of body imaging broadly conceived influence each other. In what ways is the body being imaged? When can parts of the body come to represent the whole? What does it mean to see or to image pathology (vs. the healthy body)? How do we define a healthy body image and an image of a healthy body? How do particular images of the body foster relationships (not always positive) between science and literature, doctor and patient, or art and technology? Specifically, how do these questions arise in psychoanalytic contexts and what can psychoanalysis bring to these conversations?
Keynote Speaker: Lisa Cartwright, Professor of Visual Arts, Communication & Science Studies at UC San Diego
"Mirrorlessness: Reading Cameras through Winnicott”
Known for her work on visual culture and the body in feminist science and technology studies, and working at the intersections of art and medical history and critical theory, Dr. Cartwright is the author of books including Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture and Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (co-author Marita Sturken). Recent essays consider the landscape photography of photographers including Catherine Opie, the history of film technology, and the visual cultures of viruses. She directs the Catalyst Lab, an initiative that supports collaborations across art, science and technology with emphases in feminist and critical theory and in experimental documentary practice. The lab is home to the online journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory and Technoscience and supports collaboration with the FemTechNet, an international network of feminist scholars, artists, and teachers of technology, science, feminism, and digital media.
Featured Speaker: Sander Gilman “From the Nose Job to Face Transplants: A History of the Authentic Face”
Distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences & Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, The Third Reich Sourcebook (with Anson Rabinbach) was published with the University of California Press in 2013, He is the author of the basic study on the visual sterotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986.
Featured Speaker: Stefanie Speanburg "Re-imag(in)ing the Borderline figure in Psychoanalysis"
A graduate of the Smith College School for Social Work, Dr. Speanburg has also graduated a three-year residency in the psychotherapeutic treatment of trauma and attachment related mental illnesses at Metropolitan Counseling Services. In 2012, she completed a psychoanalytic psychotherapy fellowship at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute and earned her doctorate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as a certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies at Emory University. She teaches psychoanalytic theory for the China-America Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA) and continues to co-teach courses in Theories of Object Relating at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute.
Co-sponsored by: The Hightower Fund, The Department of French and Italian, The Graduate Student Council, The Department of English, The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies, The Center for Mind, Brain and Culture, The Emory University Alumni Association, The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, The Department of Comparative Literature, The Center for Ethics, The Emory Center for the Study of Human Health, The Medical Students Senate, The Comparative Literature Seminar Series, The French Enrichment and Response Association.
See the conference program
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