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Embodied Values: Bringing the Senses back to the EnvironmentA Sawyer Seminar sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation |
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Project
Summary The inadequacy of contemporary models of human-environmental relationships suggests the need to reconfigure existing and historical models of the senses within new paradigms informed by the inter-dependent exchange between mental and physical ecology: that is, embodiment. The Sawyer Seminar series will seek to challenge, and to re-think, presuppositions of Western twentieth-century engagement with the world such as anthropocentrism, mind-body dualism, and isolated subjectivity. The rationale for these comparative seminars is clear: firstly, we shall seek to clarify the degree to which sensory engagement in the world is a necessary precondition for the ethical self, for the intellectual self and the fully realized human being. Secondly, we aim to articulate ways in which bodily, sensory and extra-sensory perception are being or may be re-engaged with the environment - 'nature' as both immediate experience and independent reality. Cumulatively, the intention is to think what has been lost and what acquired in our historical sensory engagements; to meditate on the effects of sensory loss and deprivation, and on the conditions for enhancement. A stimulating scratch group on 'Values and the Environment' held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in 2007-08 has generated a series of discussions with, we feel, great potential for further exploration. We wish now to also engage the expertise of colleagues in Music, Art History, Environmental Education, Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science and Informatics in discussion with leading international figures from different cultural traditions, to develop new models and practical possibilities for holistic engagement of the human and the environment. It is integral to the nature of the project to bring practitioners and academics into dialogue; the idea has been developed in discussion with leading contemporary artists, health professionals and educators, who will bring additional contexts for comparison to the seminars. The six proposed seminars concentrate on each of the five senses individually, plus one on the sixth sense (haptic sense). They will be followed by a concluding conference, 'Making Sense of the Senses', to focus and develop the earlier discussions for a wider audience and to address directly questions of the value of sensory perception and its relation to the intellect and reasoning. Each bi-monthly seminar will be led by 3-5 international experts, whose papers will describe how their current research bears on the given topic. All the seminars will be attended by the core participants, who will ensure continuity, and an invited group of local and UK-wide scholars. At the final conference we hope to invite Michel Serres, one of the most eminent contemporary scholars of the senses, and Marina Warner, a distinguished writer of books on the imagination of the senses, to speak to an audience comprising as many as possible of the seminar participants and a public audience. Seminar
Two: Savouring/Taste Please contact r.j.harkness@ed.ac.uk for further information Seminar
One: Hearing/Sound Opening with a public lecture from Professor Paul Carter of Deakin University, Australia and closing with a concert from the philosopher and jazz musician, David Rothenberg, our first seminar explores the sense of hearing and its relation to the environment. Seminar speakers include: Professor David Rothenberg,
New Jersey Institute of Technology Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow The Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Rachel Harkness to the post of Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow. She took up her post on 15 March and will be at IASH until March 2012. About the Sawyer Seminar programme The Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminars programme was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The seminars, named in honour of the Foundation's long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, have brought together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities and social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. This program aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry that would (in ordinary university circumstances) be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centres, departments, or programmes. Each seminar normally meets for one year (though some have continued for longer periods). Faculty participants have largely come from the humanities and social sciences, although some of the most successful and provocative seminars have also drawn on faculty members from professional schools. Seminar leaders are encouraged also to invite participants from nearby institutions.
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