Discourse, technology and bodies without organs

Computers and Composition: An International Journal, 2019

From representation to abstraction and from the materiality of the object to the fluidity of experience, the trajectory of the artistic object from the beginning of the 20th century up until today has subjected it into a constant questioning of its material substance and an incessant expansion of its communicative means. As contemporary artists realize their work through time-specific –hence fleeting- actions, temporary installations and intangible bytes and pixels, the question of the immaterial rises as a challenging enigma that poses a new question to every answer attempt: Can we talk about immateriality and visuality within the same discourse? Can the immaterial be linked to the intellect and the corporeal at the same time? How can we experience it with the body? (Doctoral thesis in English and Spanish. See links for each language)

(In press book chapter) Details to follow post-publication, 2017

In this paper we argue that two dominant paradigms underscore the research methods used to study socially mediated images of the body: representationalism and presentationalism. By this we argue that the research assemblage of the methods themselves result in the habitual and repeated arrangement of relationships among researcher, research participant(s), and images of bodies and it’s these repeated material and discursive arrangements that result in treating online images of the body as either a) representational photos to be read as texts or 2) performative curated versions of the self. We argue that both paradigms methodologically create distance and a degree of disregard between the image-maker, the images they produce, and the researcher who studies them. Drawing on new materialist theoretical frameworks and methods, we introduce three research methods adapted for networked environments that bring the writer, researcher, and story closer together in the study of socially mediate bodies. These methods we explore, with reference to our work together and other empirical work over the past three years with young networked women and trans and gender non-conforming people, are 1. Meating in the story, 2. Networked intra-viewing and 3. Reading networked images horizontally. In the conclusion of the paper we argue that an embodied and proximate approach to studies of socially mediated bodies has larger ethical implications for researchers in theorizing, analyzing, and handling socially mediated data particularly images of bodies in respectful and ethical ways.

Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2019

The paper deals with the interface of the human body and (new) technologies; its aim being an overview of the field with a purpose to include the relevant topics within the legitimate concerns of anthropology. The author discusses the choice from competing theories and conceptual tools, necessary for the study of corporeality and technology, as well as their interaction. The concepts of body schema and body image serve as conceptual tools and examples of various forms of bodily integration with technical apparatus in different types of media, both real and virtual, offline and online. The analogy between the concept of Umwelt, introduced by German bio-semiotician Jakob von Uexküll for animal perception analysis, and the concept of technosphere by humans, provides a unique perspective on technical milieu as essential part of various human-machine assemblages. It is argued that lived (phenomenological) body, social body and physical body have their own modi of presence and forms of integration with technical objects in different types of virtual and actual reality.

Curriculum and the Cultural Body (Springgay & Freedman, Editors), 2007

The New Bioethics, 2016

On Abjection: guest issue for 'Performance Research', 2014

Qualitative Research, 2016

2019

The issues of techniques and the body, corporeality and technology — whether in interaction with each other or treated as separate fields — have preoccupied scholars back to the origins of anthropology as a discipline. But bodies and techniques are less often addressed together. The aim of this issue of ‘Forum’ is to stimulate among anthropologists and cultural historians a discussion about precisely this ‘knowledge gap’, and to foster critiques of the interrelationship of corporeal and technological realities, including such areas as the mechanics of technology and its instrumentalisation of the body. This might include topics such as robotisation and ‘cyborgisation’, the expansion of human capacities with the aid of new technologies, the competition between human intelligence and IT, the technological dimensions of biopolitics and biopower, new cognitive techniques such as neurohacking, and the emergence of transhuman studies.