2022 Conferences
Bodies of Pain: Somaesthetic Explorations
The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture presents an international conference on Bodies of Pain: Somaesthetic Explorations, November 3-4, 2022 Boca Raton Campus.
Call for Papers
The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture of 大象传媒 invite paper proposals for a conference on 鈥淏odies of Pain: Somaesthetic Explorations鈥 that will be held November 3-4, 2022 at 大象传媒鈥檚 Boca Raton campus. The conference鈥檚 call for papers is as follows:
Bodies of Pain: Somaesthetic Explorations
Pain seems an inevitable feature of embodied life, and a complex one. Although often identified with a mere physical sensation, pain clearly has its mental or spiritual forms and features. Indeed, even physical pain is experienced as a mental event and seems to bridge the alleged divide between body and mind that somaesthetics contests. While Freud鈥檚 pleasure principle and commonsense suggest that our behavior aims at 鈥渁n absence of pain and unpleasure鈥nd鈥t the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure,鈥 our actual conduct displays a willingness to pursue practices (recreational or religious) involving considerable pain and to enjoy pleasures that contain significant admixtures of pain.
We typically consider pain as negative in value, but clearly it has valuable uses. 听Eastern and Western medical practices often involve pain, which can be part of either progress toward or away from a patient鈥檚 recovery. 听Pains alert us to dangers, from the simple lesson of a hot stove to the somatically felt pangs of recognizing moral wrongs. 听Pains teach us about the physical and ethical contours of our world, and range in variety and intensity, from disturbing discomfort to excruciating agony. 听These multiple manifestations find significant expression in the arts as well as in countless fields of academic research. 听Having focused largely on pleasures and beauty, somaesthetics should examine more closely the realm of pain and consider the most promising ways to understand it, ways that go beyond mere palliative care. 听As pain has an extensive history (including long narratives of painful oppression and persecution), it would also be interesting to learn from past cultural modes of handling pain and its uses.
The conference is open to contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives in the humanities (including medical humanities), social sciences, and the arts, but also to pertinent contributions from therapeutic fields dealing with pain. 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 on the conference papers to be published in the Brill book series Studies in Somaesthetics: 听