THE BODY AND
PSEUDOSCIENCE IN THE
LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
Interdisciplinary Conference 18 June 2016
Newcastle University
Call for Papers
‘Sciences we now retrospectively regard as
heterodox or marginal cannot be considered unambiguously to have held that
status at a time when no clear orthodoxy existed that could confer that status
upon them’ (Alison Winter, 1997). The nineteenth century witnessed the drive to
consolidate discrete scientific disciplines, many of which were concerned with
the body. Attempts were made to clarify the boundaries between the ‘scientific’
and the ‘pseudoscientific’, between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. This conference
asks what became lost in separating the orthodox from the heterodox. What
happened to the systems of knowledge and practice relating to the body that
were marginalised as ‘pseudoscience’? Was knowledge and insight into the human
condition lost in the process? Or is it immortalised within the literature of
‘pseudoscience’?
This interdisciplinary conference considers
how different discourses of the body were imagined and articulated across a
range of visual and verbal texts (including journalism, fiction, popular
science writing, illustration) in order to evaluate how ‘pseudoscience’
contributed both to understandings of the body and what it is to be human and
to the formation of those disciplines now deemed orthodox.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
·
Acting on the body – the body
as a site of experimentation and scientific contestation
·
Pseudoscience and the gendered
body
·
The entranced body as the
conduit for knowledge of the self
·
The ‘scientifically’ prescribed
body – an attempt to rationalise the irrational?
·
‘Pseudoscience’ and the
speculative nature of ‘science’
·
Scientific disciplines – a move
towards self-authentication and professionalization or a loss of universal
truth?
·
Pseudoscience and abnormality
·
The discourse of gender in the
séance room
·
Visual interpretations of the
‘pseudoscientific’
·
Victorian periodicals / popular
science journals and ‘pseudoscience’ of the body
·
Reading the body – fiction
immortalising the pseudoscientific
·
The attraction of the
‘pseudoscientific’ for C19 poets and novelists
·
Visual interpretations of the
‘pseudoscientific’
Please submit a 250 to 300 word abstract,
together with a brief biography, by 31 January 2016 to p.beesley@ncl.ac.uk
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