Upcoming PostGrad Café - Wednesday 7th December

The next meeting of the PostGrad Café will take place at 5pm on the 7th of December in the Senior Common Room of the Glamorgan Building. Jamie Lewis, Bambo Soynika and Louse Madden will all be presenting short papers. We look forward to seeing you all on Wednesday; as always there will be a range of drinks (inc. non-alcoholic) and snacks provided. Please see below for details of the presentations.

Jamie Lewis
Temporal Rhythms of a Chronic Disorder

I will use extracts from my MSc research to illustrate rhythmical changes in a chronic disorder. The research is based on a phenomenological study of an online group of patients who are suffering with chronic Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). By focussing on time a number of interesting observations emerged with regards to the cyclical nature of the disorder. In this talk I will highlight some of these socio-medical/ bio-social outcomes and possibly look at some temporal solutions patients have used to adjust.

Bambo Soyinka
Terrains, Time Scales, Technologies and Texts

It is common to divide documentary films into two broad categories: either observational (for instance, reality TV and wildlife programmes) or polemical (for example Michael Moore and Super-Size Me). Sustainability, however is both discourse and practice, it relates to earthly terrains, texts, time scapes and technologies. From a sociological perspective sustainability requires analysis of how key forces within society – the physical, the biological, the cultural, the emotional, the temporal and the discursive – work upon, reflect and transform each other. Given that documentary film has a sociological function, is it possible (or necessary) to represent these complex inter-relations of sustainability on screen?

Louise Madden
Using Phenomenology to Embody Representations

I will be talking about some ideas that I am struggling with at the moment. My research questions the production of women's subjectivity in relation to the internet, both on and offline. A lot of existing literature treats internet social spaces, such as chat-rooms and MUDs as something that is totally disembodied, and thus separate from a lot of the social world. I am trying to find an approach that can fully include embodiment and experience, which neither essentialises the body, nor reduces it only to representation and the symbolic. For those who are extra-interested there are copies of a reading in Jessica Ringrose's pigeonhole (Csordas) that uses phenomenology to try and reconcile the material/embodied and discursive/semiotic.

See you all on Wednesday at 5pm.