International Workshop “Body-Power-Gender. Rethinking the Practice Turn“ ( January 24-26, 2013)

University of Goettingen, Germany

The international workshop „Body-Power-Gender. Rethinking the Practice Turn“ aims to critically reflect from a gender perspective on praxeological appproaches that promise to make an innovative contribution to research on the subject of the body.
Praxeological approaches focus on performed actions, in which supposedly natural and cultural, individual and societal dimensions are always already interwoven. Therefore, they seem especially suited to overcoming established dichotomies in debates about the gendered body, such as the opposition of ‘nature’ versus ‘culture’. However, with the programmatic proclamation of a practice turn there is the danger of losing sight of structures of power and domination.
Practice theories draw on a variety of disciplinary approaches, such as sociological action theories, concepts of Historical Anthropology, philosophical contributions to Science and Technology Studies (STS) or to bio-politics, as well as anthropological approaches to embodiment. However, these diverse disciplinary approaches are rarely brought into dialogue with one another. This workshop sets out to explore and creatively engage with the limits and lacunae of existing contributions in order to make them fruitful for research on the gendered body. This endeavour is framed by the conceptual fields of materiality, discursivity, performativity and structurality. With respect to the category of gender, the workshop asks both how practice theories can be operationalised in empirical research, and also how they have to be rethought on the basis of empirical findings.