Proposed Panel at the International Seminar, "Cultures of Body, Bodies of Culture: Thinking Plurality Today" organised by the Department of English, University of North Bengal on 17th and 18th January, 2026 with opportunity for publication

(in-person panel; online presenters too may send proposals which, if selected, will be accommodated in one of the hybrid/online panels)

Panel Theme and Rationale

This panel seeks to rethink the seminar’s guiding concerns—body, culture, and plurality—through the prism of urban studies, architectural philosophy, infrastructure theory, and contemporary cultural production. We invite proposals that examine how bodies (human, non-human, machinic, ecological) are shaped, transformed, and regulated by the architectural, infrastructural, and cultural dynamics of contemporary global cities.

Cities today must be understood not merely as built environments but as multivalent assemblages of bodies, material systems, cultural imaginaries, and technological infrastructures. Our objective is to examine the city as an embodied condition: a space where multiple forms of flesh—organic, digital, atmospheric, machinic—intersect and co-produce one another. The city is not a backdrop but a constitutive force of embodiment, where bodies are contoured by rhythms, circulations, and power geometries that exceed individual agency (Lefebvre, de Certeau).

Infrastructural Embodiment and Urban Ecologies

We are particularly interested in the politics of infrastructural embodiment. Infrastructures (roads, energy grids, data networks, disaster-response architectures) constitute what Brian Larkin terms “poetic and material forms” that shape the textures of cultural life. Following Mbembe, we acknowledge that infrastructures are racialised and politicised instruments that expose certain bodies to precarity while enabling privilege for others. The body thus functions as a node in broader networks of access, abandonment, and circulatory power.

Furthermore, urban atmospheres—thermal, affective, toxic, or sanitised—govern forms of dwelling and cohabitation (Sloterdijk). This is intensified in the Anthropocene city (Chakrabarty, Moore, Tsing), where heat islands, microplastics, and infrastructural collapse mark the city as a bio-political and geo-ecological crucible where human and non-human bodies absorb environmental stress unevenly.

Plurality Beyond the Human

Plurality today also demands attention to bodies beyond the human. The city teems with multispecies life (stray dogs, rats, micro-organisms) crafting shadow-ecologies within the built environment (Haraway). The panel encourages readings of the city through posthuman ethics (Braidotti), acknowledging how the human merges with digital, animal, and machine ecologies, creating pluralities that challenge traditional ontological boundaries.

We welcome submissions engaging with:

• Agential realism (Barad), where matter is active and performative.
• Individuation (Simondon), where buildings and bodies are co-evolving entities.
• Cosmotechnics (Hui), where urban infrastructure embodies cultural and cosmological difference.

Data Bodies and Affective Infrastructures

As cities embrace smart governance, biometric databases, and omnipresent sensors, the urban body becomes a data body: fragmented, tracked, and rendered legible to algorithmic systems (Zuboff, Hansen). This expands the theme of plurality: a single person inhabits multiple bodies—legal, sensory, biometric, affective—each differently embedded in the infrastructures around them, leading to new forms of “digital vulnerability” (Virilio).

The city’s architectures also hold memory and trauma in uneven ways. We invite analyses of the affective infrastructures of trauma, care, and exclusion in urban spaces, exploring how architecture inscribes power geometries related to caste, race, labour, mobility, and gender into the urban fabric (Berlant, Ahmed, Sedgwick).

Panel Call for Presentations

We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following sub-themes, which resonate with the seminar’s CFP:

• Urban infrastructures as cultural technologies of embodiment
• Architecture, sensory production, and the somaesthetics of the city
• Climate culture, toxicity, and ecological vulnerability
• Data bodies, biometric governance, and algorithmic cities
• Multispecies, non-human, and posthuman cohabitations
• Affective infrastructures of love, grief, and exhaustion
• Speculative, futuristic, and cyberpunk imaginaries of cities and bodies
• Narratives of migration, labour, and urban precarity

This panel aims to build an interdisciplinary conversation to reveal how embodiment in cities is always infrastructural, always ecological, and always cultural.

Last date for submission of Abstracts: 15th December, 2025

Notification of the acceptance of the abstract: 31st December, 2025

Seminar Dates: 17th and 18th January, 2026

Submission Guidelines:

Send the abstract of your proposed paper in Times New Roman and 12 Font.

Word Limit: 250 words.

Add two to three keywords and a short bio-note of 100 words.

Please follow the MLA 9th edition for formatting and citation.

Abstracts should be submitted via e-mail to: subashishbhattacharjee@gmail.com

Please write ‘Body Culture Seminar’ as the subject of your email.

Selected papers reviewed and approved by an editorial board will be part of a possible post-seminar book.

Registration Fee:

• Students: INR 600

• Research Scholars: INR 800

• Faculty Members: INR 1800

• Online Paper Presenters: INR 1000

• International Presenters: $30 / €25

Panel Chair: Dr Subashish Bhattacharjee, Munshi Premchand Mahavidyalaya, University of North Bengal