CfP: Acts of Non-Violence, Signs of Healing - Movement and Bodies Annual Conference (Online)

Friday 10 May 2024 from 1 – 4.30 PM UK time
Zoom (Online)

This international conference explores the phenomenological turn to 'first relationships'. It assesses how attending to basic structures of relationship, through artistic perception, enables us to envision systems of healing and peace. This conference is for academics and artist-practitioners. It will finish with an interactive workshop led by Dr. Verónica Cohen (Paris).

Each participant is invited to propose a short 15-minute presentation on the topic, through to their discipline of choice.

This can involve exploring:
  • the role between the artist as creator and therapist,
  • the creator and collaborator paradigms,
  • social prescribing paradigms and the role of the arts
  • the art as symbol for bodied experience,
  • the divergent phenomenological traditions of the body in its role as artist and responsible.
A short abstract and title by 17 March is to be sent to movandcare@gmail.com. Participants are welcome without needing to present.

Workshop: Learning from the Body: Describing Personal Experience

How do you describe personal experiences?

Many times, in our artistic or academic research, we need to be able to approach our own personal experience. Nevertheless, how do we genuinely perform this task, in a way that reflects the experience itself? The phenomenology method seeks exactly that, or, as Merleau-Ponty, puts it in the prologue to Phenomenology of Perception: “to describe and not to explain”. This general statement is easy to repeat, but difficult to perform. This workshop aims to use the phenomenological method as a point of departure to explore different types of descriptions: objective, subjective, and then, phenomenological. By performing short exercises, we will develop tools for personal descriptions of our experience.

Verónica Cohen holds a PhD in History and Theory of Arts at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires and the Centre of Contemporary Arts, University of Lille. Her research is interdisciplinary insofar as it combines elements of phenomenology, dance studies, and body studies. As an artist, her works are influenced by buto dance training. She is working on a project to better understand the role of verbal expression in dance. By considering verbal expression as integral to the development of dance practices as dynamic processes, the project will help us to answer two associated questions: how is verbal expression embodied? And how are dance practices shared among practitioners and outsiders? Studying this would be relevant not only for dance practices but also for sports, yoga and martial arts.

This event is supported by MSH Paris Nord, and the Bakhita Centre for the Study of Slavery, Exploitation and Abuse at St. Mary's University. For more information, see: https://www.stmarys.ac.uk/events/2024/06/acts-non-violence-healing