With the allocation of the research funds, I will want to further develop the research center for “Body Cultures in Motion” that I have established and further anchor it both within the university and also internationally. In the Department of Languages and Cultures several researchers are dealing with questions related to “performing bodies”. The concept of performing bodies next to ‘figurations’ focuses on historical and cultural “movements of bodies” as well as “moved bodies” and the social, political, and media-related technical constraints. The research group will, bring together researchers from different fields and focuses on corporeal practices and the relation of body and performance – respecting the backdrop of the complex and ever-changing history of those terms. Key aspects of cultural studies like individual, collective, and cultural identities, perception and interpretation, self-assertion, gender assignments, cultures of commemoration and remembrance, are approached beyond static descriptions of symbolic systems in consideration of relativity and effectiveness dissolving single disciplines’ limitations. Certain concepts are considered crucial in the approach of the research group: 1. Corporeal practices as well as semantics coined by bodies and concentrating on practices that create, preserve, reproduce, and change collective systems of value; 2. Bodies perceived as a processual, historical and alterable/modifiable entity while they at the same time realize the body’s functionalities and fixations (Foucault, Butler et al.), not operating through awareness or sense or not exclusively taking place between humans (for example Animal Studies in terms of humans as animal amongst others); 3. The body as medium of communication such as cultural techniques, or bodies as agitated and destabilized places, which permanently expand the boundaries but also bodies as objects of order and production of knowledge (gender studies, dramatics, etc.); 4. The body as the “first and most natural instrument of mankind“ (Mauss) that is able to cultivate and professionalize specific corporeal techniques, both in the “Zweiheit” (“duality” acc. to Gugutzer) of the tangible body and the intangible body as the place of sensual perception and subject constitution.

The main intention during the funding period is to focus on workshops and conferences that will bring together specialists in the various research areas and ultimately result in sustainable collaboration and publications. From building a larger network and publishing the research results in open source we create greater visibility. In addition, through greater visibility and outreach activities we hope to attract doctoral students and postdocs. Within the centre, there are currently three research pillars that involve colleagues from different departments at Ghent University as well as different universities :

1. The body as medium in travel literature: This project is initially a project of the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and our research centre was invited to be part of this research project: https://www.uni-koblenz.de/de/philologie-kulturwissenschaften/forschung/traveling-bodies-bodies-and-corporeality-in-travel-literature. We will strengthen cooperation with this project and also involve colleagues from other disciplines (Africa, literature) at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. The basic premise of the project is the conceptual difference between embodied experience as expressed in texts and the embodied experience of the empirical traveler while traveling. The research focuses on the perceptions and experiences of the “travel writer,” i.e., a media figure, the “I” or “me” in the text, who is part of the textual representation. The travel writer's articulated and staged bodily experiences stand in a complex relationship to the real experience of travelers, as do the traditions, conventions and prefigurations/mediations associated with travel writing. The network works with sample analyses of texts, in different languages, based on actual travel, because it can be assumed that there is a continuity (however complex, palimpsestic, revised and rewritten) between the “actual” embodied experience of the traveler and its articulation and staging in the text. To avoid excluding certain practices of travel or articulations of travel experiences, we work with a broad definition of travel writing. Focused on various topics important to the traveling body, approaches and their theoretical and methodological implications will be discussed and examined for their value and productivity for the field of travel writing in general. The work of the network will be made accessible in the form of publications.
2. Olympics, sport and nation: This pillar within the centre focuses mainly on Japan until now, but with the intention to go beyond the context of Japan here as well and focus on the East Asian context. In future, the intention is to internationalize this pillar and especially study the East Asian context. A first workshop with Korean and German colleagues in Münster was promising and further workshops and publications are planned. The recently established Olympic Study Centre in Ghent will also be involved in this pillar. In recent years, the Olympic Games have increasingly been receiving negative media attention due to bribery scandals in the bidding process, doping cases, debts of the organizing cities, forced evictions due to the building of stadiums, negative environmental impact of the Games, etc. The Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius has been exposed as being an anachronism that could even be considered to be futile to a millennium that shows mankind the limits of growth and the consequences of an ideology that singularly worships competition and the pursuit of records. What is more, despite its internationalism and its claim of being global and universal, the Olympic idea that is in fact based on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy and ideology remains essentially Eurocentric. In this context, the current Olympic Movement and recent Olympic Games are critically re-examined and its whole ideological and philosophical foundations are questioned. Subsequently, not only the current Games are in the centre of public and media critique but also the legacies of past Games are revisited, re-interpreted, and tested against and challenged with the knowledge and values of our time.
3. Body, Health, and Ideology: Within the project, we have been focusing on popularizing medical texts, ideology and the vernacularization of medical knowledge concerning health and body and showed how ethics and political discourses became inscribed onto the body as rules or regimen seeking to create bodies that were both physically and morally ‘healthy’. We also already linked this research to our research on travelling bodies and analyzed how popularized ideas of the body and ideology are interrelated by especially addressing the traveling body in Edo period. Traveling in this part of our project seen as an act that happens at the intersection of historical, geographical (spatial), cultural, social, economic, political, and ideological conditions and circumstances, which influences the perception and the (bodily) experiences of the traveler. The transmitted realities as such are based are discursive expressions of “pre-reflective correspondence between body and world”, and as such they can only mediate corporeality. At last, we added another research project to this part of our project, which turns towards the health of prostitutes in the three major enclosed kuruwa (“pleasure”) districts of the Edo period in Japan, namely those of Shimabara (Kyoto), Shinmachi (Osaka), and Yoshiwara (Edo) and the way prostitution and health were framed within a neo-Confucian context. Within our project we aspire to further connected to and bring together specialists working in diverse and often distinct fields in Japan, the USA and Europe, from medical historians and historians of the printed book to literary scholars and art historians. One line of strategy so far was to also reach out to the Japanese research community in our field by inviting Japanese speakers and publishing in Japanese journals. While these journals might score low on the Flemish journal classification index, they open new network opportunities.