Moving bodies, moving boundaries

Conference session

In this panel we explore the conjunctions between moving bodies and shifting boundaries as well as the perception, enactment and agency thereof. We consider the shared movements of bodies as vitally contesting the concept of „bounded selves“ and other common dualities such as action/re-action and activity/passivity. We rather take moving bodies as sensing bodies, giving way to new ways of experiencing and relating to the self, the world and the in-betweens. We are interested in the interrelations of personal and more-than-personal movements that might include other people, beings, things and imaginations. Exploring „sensing“ as a collective, yet frictional experience, we are interested in the interlinks to larger social, cultural and political processes of belonging, being and sensing in the world.

We consider proprioception as going beyond an indrawn process, but equally including an environmental, atmospheric dimension entangling perceptions of the „inside“ and „outside“. The embeddedness of bodies is essential for their potentialities, experiences and knowledge of motility. In this vein, kinesthetic experiences have the capability to question embodied concepts of the self and collective, space and time, truth and reality, gender and identity, the synergetic and conflictual, the aesthetic, appropriate, „normal“ and much more.

We invite scholars to explore how various boundaries are challenged, contested, pushed back, stretched, extended, re-framed, transcended or simply accepted in their respective research fields of moving bodies.The corporeal moving might be orchestrated or improvised, routinised or exceptional, based on tradition or striving for innovation, motivated aesthetically or politically, enacted materially or virtually, as part of a protest rally or a staged performance – all the diverse settings enable the emergence of particular movements of both, bodies and boundaries.

Organizers: Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer (University of Konstanz), Claire Vionnet (University of Bern)

For more info on the conference and to submit papers, please follow this link: https://vanda.univie.ac.at/call-for-papers/