Paper short abstract:

Could we approach scientific knowledge making through a language that is intrinsic to the body? From my study about physical relationships between the human body and other bodies - human or not - I have identified a common language from where we affect and feel affected equally.

Paper long abstract:

Science is making new language codes for things that are not intrinsic to the body. Due to that language that addresses the mind, we are using our bodies in a more limited way. But then, what is the purpose of our physicality?

This paper attempts to discuss if it would be possible for the existence of some evidence from a certain corporal and spatial consciousness of our bodies through their movement that allows us to come closer to a better understanding of how our body affects and is affected equally by its surroundings and all things that are included in it.

From the evidence of a perfect geometric language, my study, the Geography of Thought reaches a conclusion that the body through its movement, has the potential of identifying itself with lines as complex as a straight line or a perfect circumference in order to establish a symbiotic relation to the spatial architecture of its surroundings.

If we could change the approach to acquiring knowledge by using a code or language that acknowledges the space from the body experience of reality, maybe we could reach or share a level of better understanding between bodies - human and not human - as a better understanding of their mutual affectation.

Paper short abstract:

The paper maps art-creation from more-than-human perspective. Based on a case study of a painting process I re-define a traditional relational model of creator-artwork and open-up a debate about the nature of artistic, but also scientific outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores a process of art creation, opening a diverse and ambiguous spaces of new alliance between matter and materiality. My ethnographic gaze follows, how the painting is coming into being. It might seem that, in this case, when examining the traditional medium, it is difficult to fundamentally compromise the dichotomies, like mind/body, fact/value, present/absent, form/content, embedded in the Euro-anthropocentric modernist heritage. I attempt to re-articulate the story of painting from object-oriented ontology. My assumption is, there is no singular creator, material or a tool organized by straightforward causality, but messy processes with multiple "more-than human" co-creators, which, in a specific and significant way take part in the artistic creation. Giving the priority to ontology over epistemology allows me to pay attention to variety of agency across the human-non-human spectrum and to its colors. Moreover, I attempt to contribute to the debate about the relation among the creativity and scientific production. Rejecting the notion of creativity as a capacity of the brilliant mind and considering it as flows of affect among various human and non-human agents (ideas, data, memories, experiences) we might glimpse an artificial nature of art objects similarly as scientific truth, value, painting, performance or text. All of it can be approached as a part of never-ending process of co-creation, where outcomes are always somewhat fragile and not permanently protected.

Paper short abstract:

This paper contemplates post-humanist frameworks in theorizing the environmental illness Electro Hyper-Sensitivity (EHS). EHS is explored as an embodied phenomenological encounter with the more-than human-world, where non-human agencies present both source of illness and informal practices of care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper revolves around the contested environmental illness Electro Hyper-Sensitivity (EHS), a condition where sufferer's wellbeing become intricately tied to invisible networks of electromagnetic fields. Interdependence with the more-than-human world is an essential thematic in theorizing EHS as porous bodies entangle with the more-than-human environment. Fieldwork undertaken in the Marvão region of Portugal surrounding four people with EHS - one of them the author's mother - leads to reflection on how the natural environment emerges as a vital source of care for EHS sufferers in the absence of more institutionalized medical treatment.

The legitimization of the illness experience (and any potential political mobilization) of EHS sufferers hinges on recognizing the more-than-human environment as an affective and moral realm in new and critical ways. EHS can thereby be positioned as a provocation to ideologies of self-containment and objectivist distrust of embodied, phenomenological knowledge which suffuse medicine and modernist notions of environment. I find that EHS must be approached as a phenomenological embodied experience, where embodiment is a paradigm of knowing that unsettles ontologies of bounded bodies. This approach suggests that environmental illness experiences urge ontological scopes where multiple non-human agencies are at play, and collectivity is instrumental in care. The invocation of non-human agencies in practices of care used by EHS sufferers urges contemplation on ties between medical anthropology and post-human frameworks, and speculative imaginings of the intersections of medicine, care ethics, and environmental politics.

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ethnography with Catholic spiritual seekers, there is a discussion about the possibilities of building knowledge under the modality of radical participation, as well as methodological and ontological reflections that arise in the dialogue with God.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on an ethnography of spiritual seekers and methodological reflections based on the debates that have arisen since the so-called ontological turn, I ended up developing ethnography in a context of Ignatian spirituality. Through the research I intend to critically examine two of the essential proposals that accompany ontological ethnographies or ontographies: on the one hand, the premise of "taking the Other seriously", and on the other, the proposal of inversion by which ethnography controls theory, and not the opposite.

Although these are old concerns, the idea is to continue the approaches of Holbraad and Pedersen by which they suggest a radicalization of these issues. Starting from anthropological symmetrization, in addition to a radical dialogue and radical participation, and an approach in which the body is conceived as a vector of knowledge and methodological device.

In these contexts of spirituality there are exceptional forms of perceptive and sensory alterity that allow us to approach epistemologically challenging objects, which, in relation to ethnographic work, allow us to rethink the agencies and relationships that take place during the research. More specifically, I refer to the proposals that take as methodologically real intangible entities, within an ontological pluralism that elevates ethnographic material to a place from which to radicalize anthropological activity.

The difficulties are multiple, beginning with the disposition to avoid ontological assumptions, to achieve a suspension of (dis)belief, or to give space to suprasensitive beings, etc., which, although not yet resolved, allow to suggest new forms of doing ethnography.

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