Workshop and plenary session for the Studium Generale Festival "The bodies that we become" at Wageningen University. 

You have a body, you are a body, you do a body. This body eats, sweats, leaks, moves, gestures, feels, desires, connects, conflicts and changes. You do all these things, also when you enter the laboratory, library, field, or interview room. And yet, modern (Western) science tends to uphold a self-image as if it is the bodyless pursuit of truth. Is it missing something? What has science to gain by integrating our bodily situation and understanding itself as bodily practices in a community of interacting bodies? The Bodies You Become invites artists to the stage and together we embark on a quest: what does the fundamental presence of our fluid bodies in our lives mean for the sciences we do and the knowledges we gather?  

During the plenary session, participants investigated how to harvest from the awareness of their bodies (and their relationality, entanglements etc) produced by the varying sessions and performances of the festival. Which specific lessons can the sciences learn from this? What are the bodies we want to have, be and do as science practitioners. What bodies could we become? Offering different kinds of prompt, this session helped participants articulate thoughts in ways that are grounded in and draw on the embodied practices presented throughout the evening. 

Pictures by Bart de Gouw