The Medicine & Its Objects Workshop Presents:
“A Phenomenology of Attention”
Sophie Reichert | PhD Candidate, Anthropology
Discussant: Tina Post | Assistant Professor, English
*Wednesday, February 23rd from 4:30-6:00pm CT*
Via Zoom Only
Please email Anna Prior (priorah@uchicago.edu) to RSVP and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper and the Zoom information.
ABSTRACT: This dissertation chapter is based on ethnography and collaboration with an international group of researchers who form the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC). The ISSC studies attention as an embodied, tactile and kinesthetic skill, thus challenging canonical philosophical, psychological and cognitive science research that conceptualizes attention primarily as a phenomenon of mind or brain. Meeting in local and virtual co-laboratories, the ISSC investigates attention not in lab studies through fMRI scans and EEG recordings but in movement-based practice in dance studios. According to the ISSC researchers, training one’s attention in physicalmental improvisational dance practice changes one’s experience and thus understanding of the world. In fact, the researchers of the ISSC are professional dancers and the ISSC advocates to research mind and body in dance practice. In a style akin to an ethnographic study of a scientific laboratory, I dive into the day to day of dance research labs, investigate methods and protocols for movement-based research on attention and explore the conceptual frameworks that emerge from first-person experience and ensemble research. In doing so, I aim to complement natural and social scientific research on attention, showing the epistemological and innovative potential of contemporary dance (and the arts more generally) for our understanding of human attention.
