Body Matters – AHRA International Conference 2024

The AHRA International Conference 2024 was hosted by Norwich University of the Arts in November 2024. It took place in the university’s Duke Street Riverside and Duke Street buildings, complemented by a series of screenings, exhibitions and performances at East Gallery and the Immersive Visualisation and Simulation Lab.

Keynote speakers included Professor Andrew Benjamin, Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor Meredith TenHoor, Professor Lucy Orta, Dr Yara Sharif & Dr Nasser Golzari, and Professor Susan Kozel.

About the theme

Body Matters aims to investigate notions of Body in contemporary architectural discourses. Always a fundamental in architecture, the body needs to be reconsidered on its own terms, as a creative, material and philosophical concern. Beyond historical materialism and phenomenological approaches in architecture, recent new materialism thought has proposed a cross-disciplinary endeavour to confront long-held assumptions about the relationship between humans, nonhumans and the world.

The material world is understood as a network of relational, non-fixed entities, always in flux and emerging in unexpected ways around actions and events. How then can Architecture position itself and its role in these shifting and pluralist perspectives? Body Matters aims to explore not only what the body looks like, how it works and performs and what it is made of, but also how it blurs its own boundaries as it resonates with the environment. Ultimately it will interrogate how bodies matter, in architecture and beyond.

The themes of this conference bring into sharp focus ‘our forgotten relation to the encompassing earth’ (Abram) to discuss a renewed environmental sensitivity, that spans across science, politics, nature and culture.