Augmented Selves: Disability, Care and the Posthuman

An afternoon workshop with Margrit Shildrick, Donna McCormack, and Sophie A. Jones

Join the Augmenting the Body project team for our final event of the 2016-2017 academic year: a half-day workshop featuring papers on microchimerism and temporality, transplantation and disability, psychostimulants and work.

Programme

12 noon-1pm: Lunch

1-2pm: Margrit Shildrick

2.15-3.45pm: Panel with Donna McCormack and Sophie A. Jones

4-5pm: Roundtable discussion

About the speakers

Margrit Shildrick is Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linköping University, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research covers postmodern feminist and cultural theory, bioethics, critical disability studies and body theory. Her major research centres on the intersection of postmodernism and bioethics, particularly in relation to organ transplantation, and in the use of various forms of prostheses. Her published works include Dangerous Discourses: Subjectivity, Sexuality and Disability (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and an article, ‘”Why should our bodies end at the skin?”: embodiment, boundaries and somatechnics’, Hypatia (2014).

Donna McCormack is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her research spans the fields of medical humanities, postcolonial studies, queer theory and monster studies, with a focus on contemporary literature and film, embodiment and memory, and biotechnologies. Recent publications include a monograph entitled Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (Bloomsbury, 2014) and a number of articles on transplantation in contemporary culture.

Sophie A. Jones is the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Augmenting the Body Wellcome Trust Seed Award. She works on post-1945 American literature and film in relation to legal and medical accounts of the body. She is currently completing her first monograph, The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and developing a second project on neurobehavioural diagnosis and contemporary American literature.

12-5pm, Alumni Room, School of English, University of Leeds. For directions, please see https://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20040/school_of_english/2393/how_to_find_us

Lunch, coffee and tea are provided. Attendance is free, but places are limited. Please register by 8th June so we can ensure there is enough food and drink for all.

For more information, please email s.jones1@leeds.ac.uk. You can also follow the project on Twitter @augmentedbodies.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/augmented-selves-disability-care-and-the-posthuman-tickets-34864665152

This event is funded jointly by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award and a University of Leeds Sadler Seminar grant.

Image credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images.