Bounded Uncertainty: Mapping, Sensing, and Mediating Nerves

This talk considers body maps as an alternative history of representation, arguing that hand-drawn maps served as a kind of sensory technology. They traced sensations that remained unseen until inscribed on paper. A close study of body maps allows us to understand the range of medical practices and theories that remained multiple and contingent. They raise questions of hybridity, translocality, and ontology, which appeared as stable forms of representation, but marked shifting conceptions about the body.

By joining approaches in postcolonial STS and critical cartography, this talk investigates the ways in which historical actors adapted a range of scales—national, transnational, regional, and personal—to elaborate on cultures of epistemology and historical ontology.

Organized by Evangelos Kotsioris (Architecture) and Phil Taylor (Art & Archaeology)