Graduate Student Conference 2011

The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nutrition and Natural Knowledge

Friday March 18, Northrop Frye 003

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Registration

Basic option: $10. Includes lunch and coffee.
Dinner option: $25. Includes lunch, coffee, and dinner.

You may register online or at the door.

Registration

Registration and Dinner (non-refundable) $25.00 Registration Only (includes lunch) $10.00

The conference dinner will take place after the keynote at Biryani House (25 Wellesley Ave). The buffet will include:

1 complementary beverage (soda) (wine/beer flat rate $5.00 extra)
Salad Bar
Appetizers (Naan, samosas etc.)
Main course 4 vegetarian dishes, 4 meat dishes
Dessert Bar

If you wish to attend the dinner only, please contact Jai Virdi so that she can keep track of the dinner numbers.

Program

Friday March 18, 2011
Northrop Frye 003

9:00 » Breakfast & Registration

9:45 » Welcome

Anjan Chakravartty, Director, IHPST University of Toronto

10:00 » The Body as Rhetorical Text

Kathleen Gibbons (University of Toronto), Porphyry's Cosmopolitanism

Paul Greenham (University of Toronto), The Lutheran Body and Scriptural Rhetoric: Philip Melanchthon’s Understanding of the Body as Rhetorical Text

Badr El Fekkak (King's College London), The Body and City in Al-Farabi’s Civil Science: The Heart as Philosopher King

11:15 » Gender and Body Knowledge

Jenna Healey (Yale University), Rejuvenating American Manhood: Theories of the Male Body and the Reception of Brown-Séquard’s “Elixir of Life” in Late 19th Century America

Denna Day (University of Pennsylvania), Data Taking and Body Making: How Domestic Thermometry Created Quantified Bodies

Emma O’Toole (National College of Art & Design), Recording Remedies & Recipes: Women’s Role in Maintaining Family Health in the British Isles during the Late Early Modern Period

12:30 » Lunch

1:30 » Health, Food, and Collective Identities

Jaya Dixit (University of Calgary), Critical Mastication: A Photo Elicitation Study of Food Aesthetics and Morality

Rachel Louise Moran (Pennsylvania State University), Lazy and Crazy: Physical Fitness Meets Psychology in Cold War America

Amy Lasater-WIlle (New York University), Indigenous Potatoes and Indigenous Bodies in Peru`s National Cuisine

2:45 » Public Safety & Epistemic Authority

Karen Agnus (York University), Timed Bodies and Self Control

Gregory Ferguson-Cradler (Columbia University), Disembodied Knowledge and Endangered Bodies: Health, Security and Science on Russian Imperial Expeditions

Eric Boyle (National Institutes of Health), Patent Medicines and Regimens of Bodily Health

Angie Boyce (Cornell University), Peanut Butter as Risk Object, Consumer as At-Risk Subject, Standards as Solution, 1966-2009

4:00 » Coffee/Tea Break

4:30 » KEYNOTE » The Long History of Dietetics: Thinking about Food, Expertise, and the Self, Steven Shapin (History of Science, Harvard University)

Abstract: A survey of dietetics as a perspicuous research site: (1) Changing ideas of who we are via changing ideas about the relationship between the characteristics of aliment and characteristics of people; (2) Changing relationships between the categories of the medical, on the one hand, and the moral, on the other; (3) Changing engagements between the knowledge of aliment possessed by experts and that owned by laypeople. I survey aspects of Galenic medical dietetics from Antiquity through the early modern period, and indicate some of the cultural and social consequences of the decline of that traditional culture and the rise of “nutrition science” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I use these materials to describe some of the key aspects of the modern condition: we are connected to the edible world in different ways than we once were; we distribute instrumental and moral knowledge differently; and we have new conditions of authority and credibility for expert knowledge which is of concern to the texture of our quotidian lives.

6:00 » Break

7:00 » Dinner (location TBA)

Conference Call for Papers

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The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nourishment and Natural Knowledge
HAPSAT 7th Annual Graduate Conference

“The body” as both a material object and metaphor, provides a rich source of inspiration for both philosophical and historical studies of the production and transmission of knowledge. Lawrence and Shapin’s influential anthology, Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (1998) broke new ground in this area with discussions of bodies as tools for philosophical inquiry, what it means for knowledge to be “embodied” in physical artifacts, and how bodily self-presentation can generate disembodied knowledge. The body also presents an arena for interplay of ideas about proper management of health and diseases and the application of scientific and medical expertise. Seventeenth century physicians, for instance, recommended a mixture of medicine and dietetics for consumptive patients; proper dietary regimes were often based on theoretical ideas about nourishment and health. Moreover, the body and our ideas of the body have been a political battleground: within the “culture of dissection” and public executions; as displays of ecclesiastical value and status; as technologically manipulable aspects of the self; as and as subjects of experimental philosophy.

On Friday March 18, 2011, HAPSAT, the Graduate Student Society at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, will host its seventh annual conference, The Regimen of Bodily Health: Nourishment and Natural Knowledge.

This year’s distinguished keynote is Steven Shapin (History of Science, Harvard University): “The Long History of Dietetics: Thinking about Food, Expertise, and the Self.” The keynote is jointly hosted by HAPSAT and the IHPST Colloquium Series.

We invite graduate students and recent graduates working in fields such as HPS, STS, history, sociology, philosophy, public health, anthropology, gender studies, and law, to submit paper and panel proposals that critically engage with this theme. For papers please email abstracts of up to 250 words to HAPSAT@gmail.com by December 1, 2010. For panels, please email a document with a 250 word abstract describing the panel as a whole in addition to individual abstracts for each paper (also 250 words). Each presenter will be given 20 minutes.

We welcome papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:

• What is the relationship between embodied lives and disembodied knowledge?
• How have health regimes influenced historical or philosophical ideas about the body?
• Do philosophical ideas about the nature of the self, identity, and human agency affect society’s treatment of bodies?
• To what extent have technologies of the body influenced science in practice (e.g. technologies of blood transfusion)?
• How are food, bodies, and personal and institutional authority related within the modern medical establishment?
• What is the relationship between personal appearance and epistemic authority?
• How have ideas about the degenerate body (e.g. monsters, deformity, disease) been shaped by cultural or social beliefs?
• How do different modes of food production and consumption affect the political relationships between bodies?
• What sorts of new political relationships, and political philosophies, are likely to arise if technological advancement makes the transhumanist dream a reality?

We hope to be able to offer billeting and small travel subsides for graduate students travelling to Toronto for the conference.

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Sponsors

Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Graduate Students Union
Philosophy
Science and Culture Working Group, Jackman Humanities Institute
Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto
Dalla Lana School of Public Health Students' Association
Munk School of Global Affairs
University of Toronto