CENTRE FOR CITIZENSHIP AND PUBLIC POLICY
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
EMBODIED CITIZENSHIP: an interdisciplinary workshop
February 11 2011
UWS Bankstown Campus: Room 1.1.114
ABSTRACTS
HELLENE GRONDA, AUSTRALIAN HOUSING AND URBAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Title: Coming home: some connections between body awareness practices,
environmental sustainability and Australian homelessness policy
Abstract
This paper uses embodiment as a resource to re-think some assumptions and drivers
of homelessness policy. It challenges a ‘good conscience’ approach that is evident in
homelessness policy, and also in many environmental discourses, by using
embodiment as an heuristic starting point. In this paper, I draw on research about
body awareness practice to focus on our own embodied vulnerability – how it is lived
and conceptualized; how we manage and respond to it; and the banal and difficult
territory it opens up. Body awareness practices (such as yoga for example) use
deliberate training to bring attention to your own body experience. Thinking about
‘the body’ through body awareness practice is a way to keep close to the
understanding that ‘the body’ is also my body: the breathing, moving vulnerability
that I am. My research found that cultural studies body theory was neglecting this
crucial dimension of embodiment, its vulnerability and the dependency it entails: a
dependency both my own body and the physical and social ecosystem in which I am
embedded. Using the perspective of body awareness practice, I theorised the
relation to my own body, that little piece of nature I call my own, as an ethical
encounter and a deconstructive moment that could moderate good conscience
tendencies in eco-philosophy by including our relationship to ‘pesky nature.’
In this way, I frame an opportunity that lies within embodied vulnerability: an ethical
and creative moment, a moment for responsibility and relationship. I use this
opportunity to open up some questions about the assumptions of homelessness
policy. In particular, I suggest that the necessity and opportunity of relating to the
banal and difficult aspects of embodiment, of our physical and social embeddedness,
models an approach to social inclusion which might take homelessness policy
beyond good conscience.
Bio
Hellene has over a decade of experience in body awareness practice including
professional massage, yoga and the contemporary dance form, Contact
Improvisation. Her doctoral thesis Dance with the body you have: body awareness
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practices and/as deconstruction (Monash 2006) built a complex picture of the
relationship between bodily experience, freedom and environmental ethics.
Since 2002 Hellene has worked in the area of housing and homelessness service
delivery and policy. She co-led the development of a homelessness common
assessment and referral framework for the Victorian Office of Housing, 2005-2007.
She is author of What makes case management work for people experiencing
homelessness? Evidence for practice, (Melbourne, AHURI 2009), and co-author of On
the Outside: Pathways in and out of homelessness with Guy Johnson and Sally Coutts
(Melbourne, ASP 2008). Hellene currently directs a Research Synthesis Service, for
the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, which facilitates evidenceinformed policy and practice development.
CRESSIDA HEYES, PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA
Title: The Knowing Body: Somatic Experience after Disciplinary Power
Abstract: Working with Foucauldian critique of our constitution within disciplinary
power often seems to render lived experience—perhaps especially our lived
experience of our bodies—politically irrelevant. While feminists have long tried to
reclaim “women’s experience”--including what Iris Young called “female body
experience”--from its erasure or overdetermination in male dominant societies, this
move seems increasingly epistemologically fraught. As post-disciplinary subjects we
are suspicious of treating our somatic experience as anything other than an
impersonal artifact. This paper examines this problem to suggest ways that
objectification and self-objectification can be overcome without accepting the
picture of bodies as the congealed effects of power.
Bio: Cressida J. Heyes is Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of
Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta, Canada, where she writes and teaches in
feminist theory, political theory, and philosophy of the body. Her first book was a defence of
Wittgensteinian ontology in feminist conceptions of the category “women” (Line Drawings:
Defining Women through Feminist Practice, Cornell University Press 2000). Her second, SelfTransformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2007),
challenges a view of the self that justifies on the grounds of personal authenticity many
contemporary somatic practices, including cosmetic surgery and weight loss dieting. Her
current work, of which this paper is a part, asks how feminist and queer phenomenological
work can inform radical political theory: what makes the finer details of our somatic
practices into political challenges?
MEREDITH JONES, Media and Cultural Studies, UTS
Title: A day at a modest Bangkok cosmetic surgery clinic
Abstract: This paper looks at practices of cosmetic surgery tourism as practiced in a
small "budget" Bangkok clinic. Medical tourism, and particularly cosmetic surgery
tourism, is most often understood as a set of practices and relations wherein rich
travelers seek treatment in poorer countries. The phenomenon exists for a variety of
reasons but is most often linked to saving money (for example, cosmetic surgery
operations in Thailand cost about a third of what they cost in developed countries).
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Here I look at this dynamic from a different point of view: the relatively poor traveler
seeking treatment in a slightly better-off country, in particular citizens of Laos,
Vietnam, The Philippines and Cambodia who seek cosmetic surgery and gender
reassignment surgery treatment in Thailand. Interviews with clients and the surgeon
are drawn upon as well as my own experience of a day spent observing in the clinic.
Bio
Meredith Jones is a media and cultural studies scholar based at the University of
Technology, Sydney. Her research is based around the intersections between culture
and technology, gender, popular media studies and feminist theories of the body.
One of the pioneers of Cosmetic Surgery Studies, Meredith is the author of
"Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery" (2008, Berg, Oxford) and "Cosmetic
Surgery: A Feminist Primer" (2009, Ashgate, England & USA, with Cressida Heyes).
Her current research is about cosmetic surgery tourism in Thailand. Her next book is
tentatively titled "Media-Bodies". Meredith is the co-founder (with award-winning
designer Suzanne Boccalatte) of the innovative Trunk books series, the first of which,
HAIR, was launched at the 2009 Sydney Writers' Festival. The next volume in the
Trunk series will be BLOOD.
ERIN KRUGER, SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
Title: Corporeality and the legal citizen: DNA, criminal law and the obscuring of due
process
Abstract: Due process is a legal principle and/or concept concerned with protecting
an individual from the state by ensuring that one may not be deprived of life or
liberty without having access to appropriate legal safeguards. In the context of
criminal law, as it broadly operates in common law jurisdictions, due process ensures
that anyone accused of a given crime has access to specific legal protections, such as
the right to be heard, the right to a lawyer and the right to a fair trial. Yet the
definition of due process assumes an idea of the legal person, namely the ‘accused,’
as an individual capable of thinking, acting, judging, and so forth. With the advent of
DNA profiling into criminal legal systems, this vision of individuality is challenged.
The body of the accused is radically reformulated through complex scientific
analyses that produce genetic simulations meant to represent the identity of an
individual at the cellular level. This paper considers how the concept and application
of due process necessarily shifts to that which is unintelligible and unclear in the
context by which the legal person (i.e. the accused) is replaced by physical and
biological replications of individuality produced through the corporeal manipulations
that define DNA analysis in the forensic laboratory.
Bio: Erin Kruger is a Lecturer in Criminology and Policing in the School of Social
Studies at UWS.
GERDA ROELVINK, CCPP, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
Title: Embodied Economic Citizenship
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Abstract: I am interested in how ethical economic relationships between humans
and between humans and the more-than-human world are embodied. In the past I
have explored this through Marx’s writing on species being and in particular his
understanding of appropriation. While the theory of species being has enabled me to
open up the idea of embodied economic citizenship, the species being concept
needs to be pushed a great deal to account for the embodiment of relationships with
others as subjects rather than as objects. In light of this earlier work, in this paper I
begin to explore how inter-subjective economic relationships might be embodied.
Bio:
Gerda Roelvink is a research fellow in the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at
the University of Western Sydney. Gerda’s research expertise is in the field of diverse
economies, focusing in particular on collective action and economic transformation. She
is currently investigating collectives responding to climate change and the ways in which
economic interdependence is experienced and embodied. She has published research in
various scholarly journals including, Antipode, the Journal of Cultural Economy and Emotion,
Space and Society.
UNDINE SELLBACH, PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF TASMANIA
Title: The Entomological Imagination: insects, instinct, childhood and civil society
Abstract: Early encounters with the natural world often take place through insects.
The beetle caught in a jam jar covered in grease proof paper is an image of scientific
inquiry entangled with wonder, cruelty, invention and delight. These childhood
scenes are of interest, both because of the relations opened between insect and
human worlds, and because of the way they function as a site for performing and
testing ethical and political concepts and their emergence from instinctual life. It is
almost as though the entomological imagination operates as an experimental
laboratory for the enactment of fears and longings about the natural world, as well
as instincts (human and non-human) and their adaptation and regulation by civil
society. This paper draws on stories about early encounters with insects in order to
complicate and question the ways we delineate the social and biological body,
citizenship and the natural world, ethics and instinct, childhood and adult life. In
particular I will focus on J.M.G Le Clezio’s novel Terra Amata which tells the story of
a young boy who plays with Potato-Bugs on the front steps of his home.
Bio
Dr Undine Sellbach is a philosopher, writer and performer based at the University of
Tasmania. Her work explores the imagination and ethics in the context of concepts
of life, instinct, animality and the unconscious. She is currently working on a project
about scientific and creative attempts to imaginatively inhabit the lives of insects.
ANNA YEATMAN, CCPP, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
Title: Jessica Benjamin’s contribution to a theory of embodied citizenship
Abstract: Jessica Benjamin offers a rich integration of perspectives from critical theory,
feminist theory, Hegelian phenomenology, and psychoanalysis (the US relational
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psychoanalytic school) in her writing on intersubjectivity. It is worth attempting to consider
the implications of her work for a theory of embodied citizenship. In so doing, I shall suggest
that the embodied citizen has always been at issue in political thought, but that it is only
with a post-patriarchal account of the embodied citizen that an actual account of embodied
citizenship becomes possible.
Bio:
I am close to the end of my academic career and have one more book in me: Individualized
Citizenship and the Democratization of Society. This paper rehearses some of the territory
for this book. I am increasingly interested in practice roles that allow me to function as ‘a
whole self’ where I face the challenge of integrating the different aspects of my being
(embodiment, awareness, thought, and spirituality) in relation to the world. I am a trained
but still very inexperienced practitioner of the Feldenkrais method; and I am also training in
the method of Deep Democracy.
MAGDALENA ZOLKOS, CCPP, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
Title: Tactile Encounters: Touch, Embodiment and Haptic Politics in the Literature of the
Affective Turn
Abstract: This paper offers a survey of the ideas associated with the figure of touch and of
“tactile encounters” in the cross-disciplinary studies of affect. It takes the departure-point in
the recent interest in haptics in the feminist aesthetics of embodiment and in the critical
studies preoccupied with the emergence of “haptic cultures” and “haptic technologies” as
alternatives to oculocentric epistemic regimes (important examples include studies of
blindness or of feminist and lesbian eroticism). Touch is understood not simply as an
“immediate skin experience,” or “the laying of hands,” but, as J.J. Graham has argued, as
subjective sensibilities to and engagements with “the world adjacent to the body by the use
of the body.” Haptic perceptions and connections are closely linked to movement as
embodied active explorations of the world. They potentially create new ways of
understanding “bodies-in-relations,” by undertaking a re-valuation and re-organization of
what has often been relegated to peripheries of social and bodily sense experience.
Contributors to the affect debates have placed strong emphasis on the conjunction of
haptics, embodiment and relationality insofar as touch signifies the act of “reaching forward,
[…] and of creating space-time through the worlding that occurs when bodies move”
(Mannig, Politics of Touch, 2007). This paper aims to provide an overview and exploration of
these themes by focusing on the work of Mark Peterson, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi and
Laura U. Marks, with a particular focus on the political implications of this emerging field of
study.
Bio:
Magdalena Zolkos is Research Fellow in Political Theory at the Centre for Citizenship and
Public Policy, University of Western Sydney. She is the author of Reconciling Community and
Subjective Life. Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Amery and Imre
Kertesz (Continuum 2010). She works in the area of continental political theory and her
current project focuses on post-foundational political community in genocidal aftermaths.
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