CQ’s final seminar of the Fall semester will be on Wednesday, December 4th. We will be serving pizza, salad, and an engaging talk on embodied mapping!
Embodied Mapping: A visual-based, new materialist methodology for investigating the contemporary contexts of technologised biomedicine
Speakers: Dr. Rory Crath & Dr. Christian Rangel
Time: Wednesday, December 4, 12:00-1:30pm
Location: HS 208, 155 College Street
Abstract: A school of critical sexual health scholars argues that biomedical and digital technologies need to be understood not as mere objects of use, but as having agentic capacity to effect new senses of the self and transform social/sexual health relations and outcomes. Such a call to grapple with the multidimensionality of technologies, their affects and effects poses a challenge to current methodological frameworks. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel visual methodology called “embodied mapping” that builds on the arts-based method of body mapping. Drawing from new materialism scholarship, embodied mapping extends the scope of inquiry of sexual-health research and conventional qualitative methods. It does so by interrogating the capacities and properties of sexual agents, technologies and readily available discourses on sexual health and HIV prevention as co-constitutive within the sexual-health-technologies nexus itself. Embodied mapping’s research process is collaborative and emergent; researchers, together with an artist and research participants co-create a visual collage tracing the thick moments of sexual/health encounters. Embodied mapping’s methodological and analytical capacity to approach health phenomena as performative and immanent to the research process could open new sightlines for comprehending and intervening in this globalised era marked by an increasing technologising of health care delivery.
