Session Title:

TBC

Session 1 Chair:

TBC

Session Abstract:

TBC

Session: 1

Paper 1

Title:

Feminist reproductive Health Geography: between autonomy and policy.

Author(s):

Girolamo Cusimano (University of Palermo)

Presenter:

Girolamo Cusimano (University of Palermo)

Abstract:

Only by few years emerged a feminist geography of health, more less outlined is a feminist reproductive health geography. Through different geographical scales the free maternal choice is burdened first of all by a complex of cultural conditions. This consciousness is aknowledged since the historical feminist theory that declared the consequences of demographic policies whose choices motherhood is submitted.

In Western countries one of the expression of the neglected autonomy of female freedom in reproductive choices is the political rules to access to assisted reproductive technologies.

Nevertheless the legislation constrain different limits and even women association and feminist sociological, geographical and philosophical theories has expressed different reaction to this new opportuniy.

This article contributes to the understanding of what wide is the female autonomy allowed by legislations, particularly referring to english and italian one.

The legislative framework account will provide the cultural conceptualization of the female body bound to maternity identity.

Finally the examination of health care reproductive and maternal services at the national scale of Italy will express an usefull empirical indicator to appreciate the real opportunity given to women to the right of free decision.

Paper 2

Title:

Pedestrian bodies and sensory atrophy: Parkour and re-sensitising bodies in the city

Author(s):

Kate Evans (Swansea University)

Presenter:

Kate Evans (Swansea University)

Abstract:

Parkour or ‘the art of displacement’ is becoming an increasingly popular practice in cities throughout Britain and Europe. Practitioners of Parkour, or ‘traceurs’ as they are known, aim to achieve fluidity of movement over and through space, unencumbered by bodies and unhindered by obstacles such as changes in level or built structures. Not for them the prescribed routes, or movement conventions which characterise urban pedestrian mobility.

This paper explores the potential of Parkour to offer a mode for 'sense-traversing' the city - critiquing the sensory perspective afforded by conventional bi-pedal mobility, and the extent to which pedestrian bodies are atrophied and de-sensitised to the materiality and tactile vibrancy of their surroundings.  Central to this are the relationship between sense and social sensibility and corporeal experience, and the potential of 'common sense' to inhibit corporeal encounters in the city, and how this manifests itself in the Parkour experience.

Paper 3

Title:

Distortion Space and Time in the phobic Experience

Author(s):

Avi Aharoni (Durham University)

Presenter:

Avi Aharoni (Durham University)

Abstract:

The current study uses the phenomenological method in studying the phobic experiences and the distortion of basic spatial elements: fields, cores, bridges and borders in the existential space, as a

Result of the distortion of the perceptual space among individuals while suffering from phobic disorders. Psychologists tend to define the phobic phenomenon as a sort of irrational anxiety. Therefore, it doesn’t attribute much importance to the causes of the anxiety in the external world as it

is experienced by individuals suffering from phobia disorders. Furthermore, the field of psychology tends to ignore the dominant role of the spatial factor. When anxieties are perceived in the existential space, they are transferred to the outer world; at the same time, in the existential space, a distortion

Occurs, which then becomes a real and tangible threat to the individuals who are experiencing the phobia. This experience imposes a meaningful and significant limitation on the “I” in the individual’s Daily reality, and also harms the functioning ability of the individual suffering from phobic disorders (harm to the consciousness and its associated elements).

Paper 4

Title:

Temporality, embodiment and techniques of the self.

Author(s):

Leila Dawney (University of Exeter)

Presenter:

Leila Dawney (University of Exeter)

Abstract:

This paper begins with a critique of the idea of the self as interiority, suggesting that an internalised self is an effect of techniques, technologies, practices and, importantly, dreams and affects which work to sustain the illusory effect of a stable internalised self. From the (problematic) position of the dreaming, feeling subject, I suggest that the dimension of temporality is an essential aspect of the process through which techniques of the body become techniques of the self. The phenomenological terms protention and retention allow us to think the ways in which the dreaming subject negotiates and works with past and futurity in the active pursuit of becoming-other as a way of becoming-self. This is discussed with reference to fieldwork on walking the English South West Coast Path, where walking, as an embodied practice of the self, is used to think about the infolding of temporality through body memory and future self in the poesis of the moment. Identities, cultural landscapes and practices emerge as analogical syntheses of imaginaries, materialities and relations through embodied practice,