Events at Reed

September 5

Lecture: Emily Beausoleil, "Moved to Listen: The Embodied Conditions of Receptivity in Politics"

6 p.m., Eliot 207

Drawing on recent neuroscientific research, Emily Beausoleil, a lecturer in politics at Massey University in New Zealand, argues that the receptivity that politics demands is contingent on somatic conditions and cues we have barely begun to understand. She turns to experts in precisely this domain—dancers and movement therapists for whom listening is primarily somatic and whose practices are designed to cultivate receptivity even as they challenge deeply held and often latent beliefs and values—to explore their potential contribution to our understandings of the role the body might play in our relative openness or refusal to listen. Sponsored by the political science department.