Special Topics Panel: Digital Embodiment

The Digital Embodiment panel of the Brandeis University Graduate Conference invites the submission of papers/presentations that examine the body in light of digital media and culture. Where this year’s conference, Fleshing Out the Text, more broadly seeks to inspect sites where the body has been ill-defined or elided, the Digital Embodiment panel intends to complicate the very status of the body by considering its presence, significance, and coding in digital and virtual worlds.

Questions we seek to pursue include: Do digital media offer utopian spaces for the renegotiation of the bonds between body and discursively produced identity? Is escape from the imprisoning soma still our most prominent narrative? What traces does the body leave lingering in virtual or material space? How do digital media call the body into question as a term for exploring categories of difference? What forms does the body take in what we might call our posthuman moment; how do these embodiments reshape epistemology and ontology?

Suggested terms and topics include, but are not limited to:

• digital ontology and globalization
• digital ontology and gender/race/class/etc.
• digital performativity
• natural and artificial
• cyborgs and prosthetics
• interface and integration
• cybernetics
• the end of cyberpunk
• online utopias
• MMORPGS
• Second Life
• real and virtual
• cybersex
• avatars and self-fashioning

Send 300-word abstracts to bodyconference@brandeis.edu by June 1, 2008.