PaTHES Webinar: Sharon Todd, Encounters of touch: On-line education and the space-time of the virtual
Feb 29, 2024 08:00 AM in London
Speaker: Sharon Todd, Maynooth University
Abstract/summary: This talk is based on some thoughts drawn from my recently published book from SUNY Press: The Touch of the Present: Educational Encounters, Aesthetics and the Politics of the Senses. There, I investigate the importance of the body for education and argue for an understanding of education as fundamentally a process through which one becomes a subject through our sensory relations to our environment. In this presentation, I aim to discuss on-line education from the point of the view of the body and the senses and suggest that digital encounters need to become ‘more virtual’ – virtual here understood through Brian Massumi’s work as an opening, a potentiality, towards something that is not yet. Thus, rather than jump to the assumption that digital education is entirely disembodied, I outline here another way of thinking about designing digital encounters through our teaching that links this potentiality of becoming with how we bodily relate through online space.