November 9-10, 2017
The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture invites proposals for papers to be presented at a 2-day conference, November 9-10, 2017 at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.
Bodies are the primary platform where self-cultivation techniques develop in Asian cultures. Although proponents of somatic self-cultivation present body disciplines as fundamental instruments for liberation, others sought to twist bodies into tools for oppression and control. Not only considered as a tool for self-improvement in the path to ethical and spiritual progress, the body was contrastingly regarded as an abiding threat to morality and spirituality. How are we to understand and navigate these paradoxes? How are these different views represented not only in religious and philosophical texts but also in art and literature? Asian perspectives on embodiment, together with Asian somatic disciplines, are increasingly pervasive in Western culture. How does this transcultural travel take place? In what ways are the original ideas distorted, misunderstood, or enriched by their importation into new contexts? How do contemporary Asian cultures regard their own traditions and reconcile them with those of Western modernity? How do gender and sexuality studies provide new ways to understand how the microcosm of the body interfaces with the larger structures of religion, politics, and culture? The conference “Bodies of Virtue: Asian Perspectives on Ethics and Somaesthetics” will address these questions from the diverse disciplinary perspectives of religion, philosophy, history, the visual arts, literature, cultural and gender studies, and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics.
Selected papers may be developed for publication in The Journal of Somaesthetics (https://journals.aau.dk/index.php/JOS) or in an edited book based in part on the conference papers and published in the series Studies in Somaesthetics (http://www.brill.com/studies-somaesthetics).
Abstracts of 250 words and a current CV should be sent electronically as attachments to Richard Shusterman at bodymindculture@fau.edu, as well as to bodymindculture@gmail.com, no later than August 1, 2017. Further information about the conference will be made available at http://www.fau.edu/bodymindculture, where you can also consult the programs of our prior international conferences. Prospective speakers will be notified by August 25, 2017.
Conference inquiries should be directed to bodymindculture@fau.edu.