Bodies in the City: Seminar on cultural diversity in Toronto
The Jackman Humanities Institute Program for the Arts is pleased to present:
Bodies in the City
An interdisciplinary seminar on cultural diversity in Toronto
Steve Pile writes that "both the body and the city are intensifying grids for simultaneously social and psychic meanings, produced in the mobile, conflictual fusion of power, desire, and disgust." (1) Invariably, the city's and the body's respective landscapes--their surfaces and their often-masked interiors--constantly work to shape the constitution of one another, creating environments that are always in flux. The resulting instability creates environments that render people vulnerable to various powerful forces--concerning, say, the maintenance of class and/or racial privileges--with their own hidden agendas. Try as people may, in the face of these often-unknown mediating influences, to stabilize their citified worlds, obtaining an enduring, settled state becomes a task that requires constant (self) surveillance. A city and its conflicted inhabitants (who constitute that very city) are threatened with disarray, dislocation, and confusion. Toronto-the-built-city is in an often fraught relation to its populace, as both the city's artificial and natural components are never as transparent as those who must negotiate a city's terrain might hope.
This one-day symposium will draw on various disciplines--English, Diasporic Studies, Philosophy, Architecture, Film, and Geography, amongst others--to examine how Toronto (in relation to other Canadian cities) and its cultural diversity imagines and deals with contemporary urban concerns, such as desire, immigration, emigration, poverty, wealth, and cultural cross-communication and misunderstandings.
Featuring speakers:
Kate Beaton
Bryan Lee O'Malley
Amy Lavender Harris
Maggie Helwig
Richard Fung
Donna Michelle St. Bernard
Dyan Marie
Devon Ostrom
William Huffman
David Hains
Emily Gilbert
Rebecka Sheffield
This event is free and open to the public; no registration is required.
Event website: http://andrewlesk.com (Click on Conferences)
Categories: Conferences, Lectures and Discussions, Events, Ideas, Seminars and Courses
