10th Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference Sydney, 13-16 June 2018

Convenors:

Andri Georgiadou, University of Hertfordshire, ENGLAND 

Leopoldina Fortunati, University of Udine, ITALY

Ahu Tatli, Queen’s Mary University, ENGLAND

In the feminist critique of the mind-body split and its dualistic counterparts: male/female, culture/nature, public/private, human/animal, there is also an ambition to counterbalance and transgress the dualistic thinking present in both scientific explanations and disciplinary boundaries. The body has become a veritable hot spot, marking itself as a boundary concept that forcefully disrupts established disciplinary identities and fields of investigation. The body is also a locus where nature and culture meet and it refuses to accommodate any easy distinction between these two terms. Instead, the very presence of the body demands a radical rethinking of the meaning of both nature and culture.

Bodies make themselves present at the very core of a range of different embodied phenomena, such as emotions, desires, identity, and agency. Embodiment in its most simple understandings means the lived experience of human beings, an experience which always bridges “the mind” and “the body”, “the natural” and “the cultural”. Embodied beings are never determined only by their material, or by their

social and cultural conditions, but at the same time they are never fully unbound or completely elastic. The historical and spatial differences, changes and stabilities in how bodies and embodiment are perceived and understood, provide insight into both the potentials and constraints of future body theory.

This stream aims to foster a discussion about the mutual entanglement of gender, embodiment and identity in organizations. The call is therefore directed to those who want to explore the embodiment of gender from a broad range of different disciplines and theoretical perspectives with the common aim of approaching the body both as a site for transgressive encounters and as actively participating and shaping such encounters. We invite theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions that explore the lived embodiment of employees and managers – how gendered embodiment affects bodily feelings and relational and organizational experiences at work, and how the body constitutes an active medium of management and organization. Contributions from different fields are welcomed. We also encourage an interdisciplinary approach, acknowledging that gendered embodiment has numerous intellectual roots and allies. The following issues are indicative, but not exhaustive, of our field of focus:

For submission details go to: www.mq.edu.au/events/gwosydney