The body has served as a site of cultural negotiation throughout local epistemic changes. Whether contending between critical disability and health humanist phenomenological analyses of health and disablement, or assessing the syncretism in a particular culture’s adaptation of its body concept to the impacts of forced assimilation or abrupt modernization, the variety of body concepts in cultural production can elaborate on cultural preservation and change.

This seminar seeks to engage with the literary forms and critical approaches which co-constitute body concepts. As such, the seminar invites papers that explore how body concepts appear syncretized or unaffected by cultural exchange in works of literature, performance, music, and other media, how cultural forms and styles support or hinder such hybridization, and whether representations of hybrid body concepts provide care to communities and societies. Contrasting objects of cultural analysis and perceptions of the human will provide complex, at times paradoxical, breadth to the methods and theories of perceiving the body in human cultures and societies. 

By bringing together such presentations, this seminar seeks to understand plural forms of embodied presence in cultures and societies. In so doing, it aspires to advance discussions of wellbeing, disability, disablement, and relationship with the world from a comprehensive set of embodied positions.