Somaesthetics and Design for Humanity in Crisis. Professor Richard Shusterman

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Time: Monday August 18, 2025, 5:15 – 6:00 PM.
(Followed by an informal reception)

Location:  AIAS AUDITORIUM, Building 1632, room 201, Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B, 8000 Aarhus

Somaesthetics is a new interdisciplinary field of research dedicated to the study and cultivation of the soma (the living, sentient, purposive body) as our medium of sensory perception (aesthesis) and action, and also the site of our expressive self-stylization.

Concerned not only with understanding but improving our experience and performance through heightened, more perceptive somatic awareness, somaesthetics involves both theory and practice.

After providing an introductory sketch of the somaesthetic project by outlining its aims, genealogy, and structure, the lecture will then focus on the application of somaesthetics to the field of design in our age of digital products that some see as threatening to make the human body obsolete along with our shared sense of humanity.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Professor Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. His major authored books include Ars Erotica; Thinking through the Body; Body Consciousness; Surface and Depth; Performing Live; Practicing Philosophy; and Pragmatist Aesthetics (now published in fifteen languages).

Shusterman received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and has held academic appointments in France, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Italy, China, and Japan. The French government honored him as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and he was awarded research grants from the NEH, Fulbright Commission, ACLS, Humboldt Foundation, and UNESCO. His research in the field of somaesthetics is nourished by his practice as a certified somatic therapist employing the Feldenkrais Method and his creative work in performance art.