COMPOSITE BODIES

SPEAKER: Harriet A. Washington, Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School

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The right of US patients and research subjects to give or withhold consent is widely assumed to be protected by law, but for decades medical research has been conducted on trauma victims and others without their consent, or even their knowledge.

COMPOSITE BODIES

Speaker: Lynne Tirrell, University of Connecticut

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What does it matter if our speech practices abandon truth, license violence, instill fear? Toxic speech has the power not only to shape the social body—our very practices of being and interacting—but also to injure individual bodies. When a political or cult leader, for example, licenses his followers to commit violent crimes against those deemed Other, we see an overt case of speech engendering physical harm. More insidious and ubiquitous are the everyday speech practices that generate harms ranging from physical violence to social exclusion and damaged health. Using tools from both epidemiology and philosophy of language, we can better understand how speech practices can create detrimental social climates and harm individual health.... Read more about Toxic Speech and Damaged Bodies | Composite Bodies with Lynne Tirrell

COMPOSITE BODIES

SPEAKER: MAX HOUGHTON, LONDON COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATION

As a curator and writer focusing on the photographic image, Max Houghton intends to make visible the racist and patriarchal forcefields that surrounded and shaped the birth of photography, and to notice the ways in which they prevail, many of which have been brought into sharp focus by the current pandemic. The role of the image in determining personhood has a long and violent history; technologies of surveillance have shaped who is seen, how, and by whom. Through the process best described as visuality, certain bodies have been broken, brutalized, ignored, or rendered invisible. Such appearances and disappearances are the theme of this talk, which will take the form of a visual essay, or image-text. 

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... Read more about Vigilare: Visible Justice and the Active Image

COMPOSITE BODIES

SPEAKER: KAREN BARAD, UC SANTA CRUZ

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In this talk, Karen Barad will expand upon their pathbreaking article “After the End of the World” (Theory & Event, 2019), which states that “quantum theory is shot through with the political.” In order to demonstrate, in relation to the theme of composite bodies, the highly political nature of not only our modes of meaning making, but of matter, they will outline the socio-political dimensions of their agential realist reworking of quantum physics and will briefly discuss the political nature of matter, followed by a discussion of the article and its implications for notions of justice. Barad’s lecture will provide the ground for a conversation with Daniela Gandorfer, who is currently a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Cruz working with Barad, and the co-founder of the Logische Phantasie Lab, a research agency that investigates injustices resulting from political, legal, economic, social, physical, and environmental entanglements.

Composite Bodies

Speakers: Michele Goodwin, Caroline Light, and Patricia Williams

A conversation on how structures of surveillance in the lives of women of color result in severe infringements on privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.