Sadler Seminar Series 16/17

Augmenting the Body: Disability, Bodily Extensions, and the Posthuman

Augmenting the Body is an interdisciplinary medical humanities project based at the University of Leeds, exploring questions of disability, bodily extensions, care and the posthuman. Launching in Autumn 2016, the first phase of the project is a University-funded Sadler Seminar Series featuring a diverse lineup of speakers from fields including medicine/healthcare, cultural/literary studies, digital performance studies, engineering, and law, which will run throughout the 2016-2017 academic year.

Body augmentation takes many forms, whether personal adaptation or the rehabilitation of those with disabilities, and ranges across the physical, cognitive, philosophical and technological. The Sadler Seminars will develop an interdisciplinary perspective on this broad field of practice: we will discuss a number of issues – the design and use of augmentation/adaptive technologies, the experience of having/living with augmentations, and the cultural representations and understandings of these interactions – central to the imagination and rehabilitation of the augmented self. The series will explore the ways cultural and theoretical ideas of embodiment meet the practicalities of engineering design and product use, to suggest critical avenues that can lead to the development of better adaptive/rehabilitation technologies.

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For further information, contact Dr Sophie Jones on S.Jones1@leeds.ac.uk

 

 

Religions and Public Health:Bridges and Barriers to Improving Global Health Outcomes

Series Convenor: Professor Emma Tomalin

This seminar series will interrogate methodological and theoretical questions about the complex ways that religious world-views and institutions shape understandings of and outcomes related to health. We will ask:

• How can we develop better translations across different paradigms for thinking about wellbeing (e.g. from the spiritual/holistic to the biomedical)? What are implications/consequences for health providers and health seekers?
• Where desired, how can we increase PH awareness amongst religious actors, including with respect to contributions they already make, as well as linking them more effectively to PH systems in their localities?
• How can we be open about the difficulties/chasms between religious and ‘secular’ actors – where can these be reconciled, and where can they not?

Through careful selection of contributors, both academic and non-academic, and drawing upon the University’s strong traditions in the study of health, the research agenda we develop will clearly focus on the most relevant questions to enable us to understand the opportunities and limits for engagements between religions and public health globally, incorporating qualitative as well as quantitative methods.