Borders, Boundaries and Thresholds of the Body 

12-13 June, 2009

Conference report

Discussions about the body have become increasingly central both in contemporary academic and public discourse, reflecting new concerns about property ownership, bioethics and biotechnological advances. In addition, modern medicine is increasingly adopting a view of complexity that links a wide range of traditional specialisms and defies simple models of disease. However, there currently exists a void between these developments and concerns, and more phenomenological and ethnographic accounts relating to lived experience and everyday practice. Thus, whilst there is a rich and established tradition of sociological, historical and anthropological discussions of the body, this work has rarely been linked to studies of science and medicine itself, and the ways knowledge about both the healthy and ill body is constructed and practiced.

This two-day workshop brought a wide range of participants, from different backgrounds and at different stages in their careers, to think about the ways in which conceptualisations of the human body and its processes inevitably have to deal with variation and ambiguity and the ways tensions which frequently arise between knowledge based on fixed categories, such as specific illnesses or anatomical structures, and the reality of individual bodies and their living processes. The workshop consequently described different practices involved in negotiating anatomical, classification and diagnostic understandings of the body, and explore how active concepts such as thresholds and tolerance are regularly central to ensure that more traditional static notions, such as borders and boundaries, are actually operationalised. This event brought together a genuinely interdisciplinary set of international speakers, all variously engaged in questioning the ways in which the body is described and made known. It provided a unique, informal space to share and explore the topic, catalyse new ways of theorising the production of knowledge about the body, and promote new debate and questions to be pursued in future.

The conference began with an introductory talk by Simon Cohn (Cambridge) that problematised key themes, and then proceeded to paired talks that were each chaired by an expert discussant. First Gail Weiss (George Washington University) and Monica Greco (Goldsmiths College) addressed issues of normality, abnormality and what falls within the current remit of the medical gaze and its notion of care. This was then followed by Ellen Balka (Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research; Simon Fraser University; Vancouver Coastal Health) and the keynote talk by Susan Leigh Star (Santa Clara University) who both drew on the idea of ‘shadow bodies’ to address the traces of bodies within systems of informatics and medical classification that nevertheless have very real consequences. The end of the first day consisted of a compelling virtual performance and talk by the conceptual artist Stelarc and a presentation by Thomas Csordas (University of California, San Diego) who both explored ides of embodiment, and what exactly that might mean in terms of the limits of bodily experience.

The second day began with talks from David Napier (University College London) and Signe Nipper Nielsen (University of Cambridge) who, in very different contexts, addressed the issue of the human/non-human borderline. This was then followed by discussions from Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam) and Elena Gonzalez-Polledo (Goldsmiths College) around issues of metabolism and the living body and the ways in which it is, by its very living nature, always in flux. The final session consisted of papers by Emilia Sanabria (École des hautes études en sciences sociales / CNRS, Paris, France) and Maryon McDonald (University of Cambridge) discussing the physical boundaries of the human body, and the ways that these can be the sites for a range of social interactions.

Overall, the talks provided a rich set of intellectual debates to re-think traditional discussions of the body, while the event itself generated a great deal of enthusiasm to find further ways to continue similar interdisciplinary discussions and perhaps find more formal outputs for them. I would like to thank my co-orgnaniser (Ms Sonia Smith), all the speakers and discussants, and everyone who attended the event that made it such a success.