The Body and its Regulation: Interdisciplinary Thoughts on Power

Victoria Cowan, English; Kiran Sunar, Asian Studies; Kristi Carey, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice; Sereana Naepi, Educational Studies
Coach House, Green College, UBC
Monday, February 29 , 8-9 pm

In a time of global precarity that makes itself known through processes such as perpetual war, exploitative labour, and neoliberalism, our respective disciplinary fields are invested in the ways in which these abstractions get written onto the body. However conceived—as embodied subjectivities or collectivities, as bodies of literature or landmass—bodies remain important sites and subjects through which we understand action, emotion, art, and control.

This panel will question how certain (e.g. racialized, gendered, classed) bodies are contained and regulated and by whom, and, perhaps more importantly, how those bodies are responding and have historically responded to their own containment. We ask what this means for us as scholars dedicated to global justice and social remedy. For living within new kinds of precarity must inform new ways of knowing and doing, and it is here that necessitates our turn to the embodied.

Victoria Cowan, an MA student in English, explores the tensions and ethics of editing the creative writing of Indigenous men in jail, highlighting the institutional constraints that shape prison writing and the choices editors make as they prepare the work for publication.

Kiran Sunar, a Ph.D. student in Asian Studies, engages a range of South Asian texts to bring to light questions surrounding genre, literary mobilization, and what these can tell us about the representation of women’s bodies and practices in South Asia.

Kristi Carey, an MA student in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, will historicize and theorize the contemporary surge of student activism in the United States, and how individual and collective bodies interface with the corporate and imperial university.

Sereana Naepi, a Ph.D. student in Educational Studies, speaks to ongoing efforts to Decolonize and Indigenize the university, using both lived experience and theory regarding embodied Indigeneity within the university.