Intertwining body-self-world

Referido pelo AMICOR Dr. Luiz E. Pellanda
Intertwining body-self-world

We invite attendees to explore the conference theme focussed on the challenges faced when attempting to theorise and research on the interface between bodies, selfhood and the social world.
Submissions on other topics within the remit of the tradition of human sciences research are of course very welcome.

The world is not an object", says Merleau-Ponty, it is the "field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. [It is] "what I live through. I am in communication with it. (1962, p.xvii)

Existential phenomenologists argue that person and world are intertwined: "man [sic] is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself" (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.xi). Phenomenology wants us to relinquish our conditioning and to bring together polarities of mind-body, self-other, individual-social, feelings-thoughts, body-soul, nature-nurture, mental-physical. The hyphen signifies intertwining rather than separation: the world does not exist 'out there' separate from our perceptions, rather it is part of us and us of it.

While scientists might talk of perception as arising in the senses and interpreted by the brain, existential phenomenologists see perception as arising from our bodily engagement with the world. The world's colours/tones/textures proclaim themselves through our senses; space is disclosed through our body movements; a sense of self arises through our relations with others and is revealed to us through our own embodied reaching out. It is only in the world that we can come to know ourselves.

This intimate interlacing of body-self-world is our theme for the conference and we invite you to explore it (though presentations on other themes are welcome as well). You might, for instance, examine ways the essential permeation between body-self-world shows itself and how human science researchers do not access an 'inner world' so much as an individual's relationship to the world. You might seek to engage the complex interconnections which exist between physical/mental health and social circumstances or how illness is encountered in the context of daily activities and the relational and social realms of the lifeworld. Alternatively, you might wish to examine how to move beyond understandings focused solely on the individual to acknowledge ways self-boundaries are symbolic, practical social constructions formed through cultural convention.

Whatever your topic, please join us in Oxford and through dialogue we can explore our own interconnections./.../