Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and guests discuss "Life and Movement"

The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation of NYPSI 

presents

Life and Movement

Friday, October 26 (7pm-9pm)
Free and open to the public
Information

How does the study of evolution, coordination dynamics, sports, social interactions, and aesthetics help us understand movement and life? In this roundtable, we will explore: movement and objects as distinctively different "things" to study; coordination dynamics and intrinsic dynamics and tendencies; kinesthesia; the evolution of social coordination; how, in the living company of others, we are both challenged and supported; the value of nurturing and pursuing a moving life with all its risks and challenges.

Moderator: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Panel: Linnda Caporael, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, and J. A. Scott Kelso
 
Participant bios:

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (moderator) is a philosopher whose first life was as a dancer/choreographer, professor of dance/dance scholar. She has an ongoing Courtesy Professor appointment in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon where she taught periodically in the 1990s. She has published numerous articles in humanities, science, and art journals. Her books include The Phenomenology of Dance; The Roots of Thinking; The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies; The Roots of Morality; The Primacy of Movement; The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. She received an M.A. in Dance and a Ph.D. in Dance and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin where she also studied for but did not complete a second doctorate in evolutionary biology.

Linnda R. Caporael is a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research concerns biology from a cultural perspective and culture from a biological perspective. She has written on a variety of topics including cooperation, group coordination, social identity, and the attribution of human characteristics to animals and machines. She is an associate editor for Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution, and Cognition, on the editorial board of Psychological Review, and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences (APS). Her published work has appeared in numerous journals and edited books including Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles (2nd ed.). She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Linfield College (Oregon), received the 2011-2012 Samuel H. Graf Faculty Achievement Award and was the 2008-2009 Allen & Pat Kelley Faculty Scholar. Currently he serves as conference chair for the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport. He is the co-editor with M. Austin of Cycling-Philosophy for Everyone. He has published articles in journals such as Sports, Ethics, and Philosophy and Proteus, and written chapters for both scholarly and popular imprint anthologies on sports and risk, the Olympic Games, soccer, hunting, sailing, martial arts, childhood and sports, and literature. Pedalling and swimming are his favored ways of moving about in life.

J.A. Scott Kelso grew up in Derry, N. Ireland and was educated at universities in Belfast, Calgary and Wisconsin. He was senior research scientist at Yale's Haskins Laboratories for 7 years before moving to Florida Atlantic University in 1985 to take up the Glenwood and Martha Creech Chair in Science and found The Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences. He is also Visiting Professor of Computational Neuroscience at The University of Ulster's Intelligent Systems Research Centre (Magee Campus, Derry). Kelso's research uses a combination of non-invasive brain imaging techniques, measures of real-time behavior and the concepts, methods and tools of coordination dynamics to understand how human beings (and human brains)-individually and together-coordinate behavior on multiple levels, from cells to cognition and social behavior. Kelso is a Fellow of AAAS, APA, APS and SEP. In 2007 he was named Pierre de Fermat Laureate and in 2011 was the recipient of the Bernstein Prize. He serves or has served on the Editorial Board of 12 scientific journals and monographs, and is Founding Editor of the Springer Series Understanding Complex Systems.

Helix Center (Marianne & Nicholas Young Auditorium)
247 East 82nd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)