Limina 2019 Panel

With or Without Body: Feeling, Creating, & Performing Emotion

In a hyperconnected world, where our social networks are quickly becoming replacements for the physical participation in our emotional communities, how do we navigate the often under-examined relationship between our emotions and our bodies?

We invite you to hear from five speakers who will share their insight and ideas from their expertise in a wide-range of disciplines, including emotions theory and creative performance, posthumanism and interfacing with death, cultural displacement and queer ecologies. The panel will draw from both their vast collective knowledge and interactions with cross-disciplinary fields to explore the [in]corporeality of emotions, and the implications of bodies as emotional conduits in a world that is swiftly moving towards a collective technological platform.

Panellists:

Associate Professor Kathryn Prince is the Leader of UWA’s node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Director of UWA’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies research group, and Editor of Shakespeare Bulletin (the international journal of Shakespeare in performance). Her research interests include theatre practice as a form of scholarly research, the History of Emotions as an approach to both performance praxis and play analysis, and Shakespeare in contemporary performance. Her latest project, “Actor, spectator…detector”, uses facial recognition and biometric data in relation to the emotions of theatre performance, developing a protocol for analysing the practice of emotions that may have wider applications,or example in AI. Her other current contracted projects include writing a monograph (Shakespeare and Emotions in Practice), co-writing another (Shakespeare's England, with David Dean), and co-editing a major collection of essays (The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare in Contemporary Performance, with Peter Kirwan). She has published widely in monographs, edited collections, and journal articles, chiefly but not exclusively on the topic of early modern drama in contemporary performance, often from the perspective of emotions.

Tarsh Bates is an artist/researcher interested in the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a queer ecology. She has worked variously as a pizza delivery driver, fruit and vegetable stacker, toilet paper packer, researcher in compost science and waste management, honeybee ejaculator, art gallery invigilator, raspberry picker, lecturer/tutor in art/science, art history, gender & technology, posthumanism, counter realism and popular culture, editor, bookkeeper, car detailer, and life drawing model. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow with SymbioticA, UWA and The SeedBox, Linköping University and is particularly enamoured with /Candida albican/s.

Dr Shino Konishi joined the Centre for the History of Emotions in 2017 as a Chief Investigator. As a descendant of the Yawuru people of Broome, Western Australia, she has long been nterested in Aboriginal history. Her research has focused in particular on the early interactions between Indigenous people and European explorers, and the way in which early European observations and representations of Indigenous Australian people, bodies and cultural practices continue to shape broader understandings of Aboriginal politics and society. Her project ‘Indigenous Australians and Emotional Pasts’ will explore both how we can recover the emotional life worlds of Indigenous people before, and in the immediate aftermath of colonial contact, and the way in which Indigenous scholars, writers, filmmakers and artists invoke emotions in their engagement with the past.

Dr Sam Han is a senior lecturer in Anthropology and Sociology at the School of Social Sciences. Originally born in Seoul, South Korea, Dr Han was aised in New York City and then spent six years teaching at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore before moving to Perth to take up a position at UWA. Dr Han is currently writing a book around his research called (Inter)Facing Death: Living in Global Uncertainty. The book examines the nexus of death, mourning and media in the context of recent developments in social, cultural and media theory. Dr Han argues that death is no longer sequestered but interfaced in aspects of contemporary life, including art, online suicide pacts, the mourning of celebrity deaths, terrorist beheading videos, state funerals of politicians and data privacy, providing new lines of thinking to one of the oldest questions facing the human and social sciences.

Facilitator:

Sam Fox is a writer, director, choreographer and producer from Boorloo / Perth. He works across prose fiction, contemporary performance and community based collaborations. He is currently a PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia where he is writing a novel that explores unorthodox unions and narratives of collectivisation. He has degrees in Contemporary Dance, English and Cultural Studies and a Masters of Teaching specialising in research. 

Training first as a dancer instilled skills of deep abstraction and a collective, interdisciplinary approach to art-making. Sam’s subsequent career has encompassed many roles including: director of contemporary performance company Hydra Poesis, based at the Centre for nterdisciplinary Arts Studios (2006-16); artistic director, DADAA’s Experience Collider (2018-19); Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2013-14); artistic director STEPS Youth Dance Company (2007-08); and Festival Producer, Artrage (2005).