This seminar explores the intertwined logics, aesthetics, discourses, and phenomenologies of health, embodiment, and experimentation.

It invites scholars to reflect on experimentation in its many senses: as scientific protocol and clinical procedure, but also as sensation, improvisation, and creative or political method. What does it mean to experiment with, through, against, or upon a body? How are such bodies rendered intelligible or anomalous—within regimes of evidence, through genre and form, or under the logics of race, gender, and coloniality? What are the political and socio-cultural consequences of being framed as an experiment or being subjected to one?

In medicine, experimentation has long structured how bodies are known, tested, healed, and pathologized. It encompasses trial participation, drug development, simulation, and repetition—but also the broader epistemologies that determine what counts as evidence or care. At the same time, cultural production offers its own forms of experimentation: narrative disruptions, speculative fictions, non-normative aesthetics, and hybrid genres that reflect and reconfigure embodied experience.

This seminar foregrounds embodiment as a lived process shaped by experimentation across multiple scales: from the internal shifts of illness and (dis)ability to the social scripts of gender and race, and the systemic violences of surveillance and control. It asks how cultural, literary, artistic, and audiovisual artifacts register these processes, and how critical methods—from disability studies and health humanities to trauma theory, posthumanism, and decolonial, queer, and Global South frameworks—can make them newly visible.

We are interested in papers engaging topics including (but not limited to):

• Embodiment beyond biomedical legibility (e.g., Indigenous, diasporic, Afro, or Latinx epistemologies)
• Overlaps and tensions between patients, test subjects, and clinical spectators
• Prosthetics, simulation, and augmentation as material and metaphor
• Illness, (dis)ability, and chronicity as sites of creative and political experimentation
• Genre and form as vehicles for experimenting with suffering, care, or resistance
• Feminist, queer, or posthumanist critiques of evidence-based frameworks

We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that situate the experimental as a critical vector for rethinking corporeality, care, and the politics of health. How do bodies “under test” disrupt the logics that seek to stabilize them—and what forms of knowledge, perception, resistance, or becoming emerge in their wake?