Tag: Conferences: Body studies

The Stark Center defines physical culture as “the various activities people have employed over the centuries to strengthen their bodies, enhance their physiques, increase their endurance, improve their health, fight against aging, and become better athletes”. Our focus remains on historical and other humanities-based approaches to the study of exercise, strength, sport training, strength athletes, competitive lifting, the healthful benefits of exercise, and all other aspects of what we call “physical culture” across the millennia.

This conference aims to create conversations around body vulnerability through critical discourses from literature and culture. It aims to examine vulnerabilities experienced by the human body through multiple perspectives such as caste and race-based discrimination and violence, bodies moving through public spaces and the violence they encounter, disabled bodies vis-à-vis discourses of ableism, queer bodies and the violence of othering, hegemonic perceptions of body image and body shaming, issues of maternal bodies and ageing bodies, among others.

The body is an intensely personal site for creativity and self-expression, yet even the most unique styles of dress reflect larger communities—people, places, and legacies that we care about and draw inspiration from. Whether we understand them as ‘imagined communities’, ‘communities of practice’, or something else, we as artists, designers, activists, educators, and scholars give to and take from communities. We often make our connections visible through material culture such as clothing, jewelry, headwear, footwear, and body modifications.

The tension in sport between discipline and creativity, continuity and change, or stasis and invention prompts us to think about knowledge production more generally. We call for anthropologists of sport to consider the dynamics of knowledge production that occur when tensions exist between form and creativity. We particularly invite papers that consider the ramifications of this tension in both their ethnographic interactions and in their own knowledge producing practice.

The “Bodies in Motion” conference presents an opportunity for scholars and graduate students to collectively explore and rethink the relationship between bodies, materiality, space and time, thereby enriching the intellectual landscape within these fields and fostering a deeper understanding of our rapidly changing world. Keynote lecture to be delivered by: Kirsten Pai Buick, University of New Mexico.

With its broader regional focus, the conference aims at decentering the history of Western European health feminism. Including Eastern European (and Eastern German) trajectories and constellations helps to reconsider key issues of current research: Can we trace elements of health feminism – understood here as a women’s social movement that framed women's physical and reproductive health as a central component of individual rights – also in socialist countries of the 1970s and 1980s?

The body occupies a particular position within general symbolism of society. It is not only a natural phenomenon; it is also a cultural construction.T he French and Francophone Studies program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette announces a call for presentation and panel proposals (in French or in English) for its annual conference returning to in-person format.