Bodies Knowing Bodies in a variety of ways

At the center of the symposium is an exhibition of fifteen posters with a range of different topics, such as bird watching, small pox vaccine, physics laboratories, organ transplantation, dancing, architecture, and dams. The exhibitors are researchers and non-academics from Sweden, Australia, Japan, and Austria, among other countries, with the common aim to discuss embodied and situated knowledge.

- Embodied knowledge has become a popular concept used by many despite knowing what it really means. Our aim with this symposium is to try to straighten out the meaning of it, Lisa Folkmarson says.

For physicist and gender researcher Anna Danielsson, also one of the organizers, the theme of the symposium inspired her and her colleagues to think about their empirics in a new way. Together with Allison Gonsalves and Helena Pettersson, she was thereby able to present a poster about embodied practices in the physics laboratory.

- When starting to think about bodies and embodiment in relation to knowledge, we found new things in our material. Physics is often seen as a pure abstract and disembodied knowledge, but as a recognized physicist you must learn how to interact physically with laboratory equipment. This kind of embodied knowledge has not yet been noticed within physics, Anna Danielsson says.

What counts as knowledge?

In addition to the poster exhibition, four keynote speakers from different research fields discuss the concept of embodied knowledge from their point of view. Yesterday Linda Martín Alcoff from Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center in the US, one of the most influential researchers in feminist epistemology, gave an introductory lecture about new phenomenologies of knowing.

- When talking about embodied knowledge, the question of power becomes evident, says Lisa Folkmarson Käll. What counts as knowledge? Who’s knowledge is worth listening to?

Kevin Aho from Florida Gulf Coast University in the US gave in his speech an account of the lived-experience of depression. “Unfortunately, what are often missing in the psychiatry vs. anti-psychiatry debate are accounts from individuals who actually live with depression. As a result, the existential questions regarding “what it means” and “what it feels like” to be depressed are ignored”, as he writes in his abstract.

Today Krister Stoor from Umeå University will talk about the Swedish forest Sámi woman Karin Stenberg and the phenomenon of joik. Finally Carrie Paechter from Goldsmiths, University of London in the UK, will discuss the topic of girls and their bodies in relation to physical education.

Future collaborations

This is the third Uppsala University Body/Embodiment Symposium, organized by the Body/Embodiment research group at the Centre for Gender Research. This year’s symposium is organized in collaboration with the Education research group at the Centre for Gender Research, and the Centre for practical knowledge at Södertörn University.

- This far, the symposium has led to a number of fruitful meetings and possibilities of future collaborations. People are very open towards each other’s work, Lisa Folkmarson Käll concludes.

Read more about the Bodies Knowing Bodies Symposium

Read more about the Body/Embodiment research group (Länk borttagen)

Read more about the Education research group  (Länk borttagen)