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CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS |
Past events:
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[click on links below or email iash@ed.ac.uk for details] Bodies in Movement Seminar Series, 25 May, 14 June, 2 July 2012 Colloquium: "The Democratic Intellect after Half a Century", Monday, 21 May 2012 Lecture by Professor Edward Mendelson: "W.H. Auden and 'the Flesh We are'": Wednesday, 16 May 2012 Self and Environment Experiential Group (SEE Group), Wednesdays at 1 pm Medical Humanities Research Network IASH Work-in-Progress Seminars STAR (Scotland's Transatlantic Relations) Renaissance and Early Modern Group - fortnightly meetings on Thursdays at 1 p.m. Further information from Dr. Elizabeth Elliott (email: Elizabeth.Elliott@ed.ac.uk) Wednesday, 16 May 2012 6.15 pm, St. Cecilia's Hall, Cowgate, Edinburgh Public Lecture by Professor Edward Mendelson: Edward Mendelson is the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, New York. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the world's authority on the works of the poet. He is in Edinburgh as the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. The evening will also include the world premiere of a setting of Auden's poem The Willow-Wren and the Stare by composer, Tom Cunningham, and a new pipe tune, "Professor Edward Mendelson's visit to Edinburgh" To obtain a ticket for this free event, please book online at http://edinburgh-university-102-rss.eventbrite.co.uk/ Bodies in Movement Seminar Series Over the Summer period, IASH will be hosting a series of half-day seminars devoted to exploring the relationship between the body and movement within the intersections of the sciences and the humanities. Research that explores the interstices of the humanities, materiality and the sciences is rapidly expanding but is also relatively recent. The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series is devoted to full participatory discussion of such research which involves scholars leading and developing new ideas which address materiality in the intersection of the arts and the sciences, early-career academics and current students. Each seminar in the Bodies in Movement Seminar Series will spotlight the work of an established scholar who will present material related to pre-selected pieces of their published writing. This will be followed by three 15 minute responses, after which we will open the floor to more detailed discussion of the various issues raised with all participants. Participants are asked to prepare in advance for these seminars by reading key material chosen by our invited presenters.
Further details on format, topics and materials can be found on the Bodies in Movement Seminar Series webpage (http://bodiesinmovement.blogspot.co.uk/p/bodies-in-movement-seminar-series.html). Attendance is free but places are limited. If you would like to participate in any of the seminars, please contact one of the organisers: Self and Environment Experiential Group (SEE Group)Wednesdays at 1 p.m., IASH, 2 Hope Park SquareThe SEE group invites you to join an exploration of how personhood is created and changed – in its identity, aims, imagination, desires, self-image, or actions – in relationship to the immediate lived and alive environment, when both persons and places are in constant physical motion. We are living in a world of rapid and disruptive motion, where everything happens fast and in a fragmented flow: we have fast machines, eat fast food, and are constantly on the move, often not spending much time in one single place. In the ancient world, before the rapid means of conveyance from place to place existed, people used to concern themselves with spiritual travels to the world beyond; the traveller was the soul alone. Today, with the help of technology, we engage in embodied travellings but to disembodied places – the fact that we are in constant and increased mobility indicates that we are not actually getting anywhere, we are not reaching a destination. The globalised world is a nowhere land, where we find ourselves only in passing, so that we do not form attachments to places or people, and avoid investing value, care, or our capacity for relation in it. At the same time mobility belongs to the environment as well; it too changes both as a socio-economical-geographical reality and as philosophical construct. In environmental philosophy there is a current emphasis on values transferred from places to people in their concrete engagements as well as on the fading boundary between (my) self and (my) place. The SEE Group aims at exploring our embodied modes of experiencing our world in motion: how mobility impacts on our sense of placedness or placelessness, on our existential sense of belonging or homelessness, on our tendency to place value on things and places, or our proneness to disengage from environment. Our informal forum of discussion will not be situated within any particular discipline but 'in between' contemporary discourses on self-environment relations, emphasizing an existential approach to analysing the development of our identity in relation to and co-dependence with the identity of the places we inhabit. We also focus on information drawn from our firsthand embodied experience with the environment, from the personal realities of living in and with a place, from the experiential exploration of the transfer between the body and personality of a place and our own. The goal is to gain more awareness of who we are or become in relation to the nature of the place we live in. At each of our meetings we will endeavour to promote here and now active engagement with the 'place' and things around us, looking to connect 'where I am' to 'who I am'. The group is open to anyone, involves no regular commitment, and requires no preliminary reading. We invite everyone with enthusiasm for ideas and interest in self-scrutiny, whether academic or not, to our weekly conversations, each Wednesday at lunchtime. Bring your sandwich, and we'll provide teas, coffees and atmosphere. Topics of discussion for the following week will be chosen at each meeting and subsequently posted on this page. MEETINGS: 25 April: topic 'home': "What do home, homecoming, homesickness and homelessness mean in our uprooted, mobile, transitory ways of living?"2 May: topic 'Place and Identity': 9 May: topic 'Consumption': As we move through the world, how are we changed by the process of taking elements of our environment into our own bodies or identities? In what ways might our sense of self be characterised or transformed by our experience of consumption - whether material, nutritional, or cultural? 16 May: topic 'Narratives of the Changing Self'
23 May: topic 'Body in Motion' For further information and to register interest, please email alexandra_parvan@yahoo.it Medical Humanities Research NetworkScreening and discussion of The Edge of Dreaming: 23 January 2012 Lecture by Professor Priscilla Wald (English, Duke University): "The Outbreak Narrative: Disease Emergence and the Obscured Geography of Poverty": 23 February 2012
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