Limina 14th Annual Conference
HUMANIFESTO: dissecting the human experience
The University of Western Australia, July 19th 2019
The 14th annual Limina conference explored the visceral, corporeal, and ephemeral dimensions of being human.
We live in a climate of debates about bodily autonomy, population growth, artificial intelligence, and genetic modification. Our bodies are marked by sex, race, age, and health, all of which are contentiously invested with social and political significance. At the same time, discoveries about our past and emerging technologies challenge fixed ideas of what it means to be human. In this way, the lines between our bodies and our humanity are being drawn and re-drawn. Extending beyond the physical, then, how do we understand and express what it means to be human?
Our topic suggestions included:
| What makes us ‘human’ | Empathy |
| Somaesthetics | Rights and rituals/funerary practices |
| Performing bodies/body as spectacle/body art | Psychosomatic conditions |
| Human and body manifests | Imagined selves/Altered states |
| Social/cultural/political expectations | Manifestos on the human condition |
| Identity: race, religion, gender, age, sexuality | Augmented reality/Artificial Intelligence/Genetic Manipulation |
| Dysmorphia/Alienation/Parasites | Past, current and future ‘humans’ and ‘humanity’ |
| Unembodiment/ghosts/haunting/manifestations | Physical and mental difference |
| Human Agency: Bodily autonomy/Human Slavery/Commodification | Expressions of humanity in memory, language, art, etc |
| Politics and politicisation of bodies, identity and humanity/human rights | Dehumanisation/Othering/Objectivication |
