Invitation to the Defense of Ludovica D'Alessandro

The Examination Panel is made up of:  Anette Baldauf (chair), Ruth Sonderegger (supervisor), Roberto Nigro (second supervisor), and Federica Giardini (external appraiser, Roma Tre University).

Abstract

The present research emerges from a wish to account for the complexity and relationality inherent to embodiment which spring up in the moment we seriously engage with the actualisation of psycho-physical vulnerabilities.
The main research questions of this project will be:

1. What philosophical understandings of the body emerge through medical, poetic, and political discourses on experiences of embodied vulnerability (e.g. illness, impairment/disability, and trauma)?
2. How is the relation between the body and what is differently posited as its ‘outside’ (i.e. the psyche, language, society, and culture) theorised in such accounts?
3. What theoretical concepts could be used or created to describe such relations and how do they impact our material orientation towards bodily vulnerabilities?

In order to address these questions, I will take undertake the specific examination of the role of three institutions with great normative powers of discursive and material definitions of the body; that is medicine, poetics, and politics. Each of these institutions will be the focus of a chapter and will be considered in relation to a specific case study.

• MEDICINE; case study: Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• POETICS; case study: Metaphor
• POLITICS; case study: Care

My leading assumption is that all these case studies exemplify the philosophical tensions and problems constitutive of dualistic understandings of the body and its relationality. Through the thesis I will review several theories of embodiment
(especially from the disciplines of Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Disability Studies, and Medical Humanities) to then finally suggest the notion of affect-ability as a conceptual tool aimed at holding together all analytical dimensions reached throughout my work.

Short biography

Ludovica D’Alessandro (she/her) was born in Bologna, Italy. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Humanities, curriculum in Antiquity Sciences, at the University of Milan, Italy, and her Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Prior to the beginning of her doctoral studies, she completed a Specialisation Course in Critical Theory of Society at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy and attended the Module in Arts in the Master of Gender Studies and Politics at the University of Roma Tre, Italy.
During her PhD, she was awarded the Marietta Blau Grant by the OeAD-GmbH (Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalisation) for a research stay at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research in Athens, Greece. She also received the Erasmus Traineeship Grant twice for a stay in the Faculty of Humanities, Department of Philosophy, at the University of Pavia, Italy and for a visit in the Programme d’échanges en Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences sociales, in the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
In the years of her doctorate, she participated as a speaker in the following conferences: Diffracted remainders of the subject? Beings in common, relations, and transformations (Mini-Symposium, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria), 11th European Feminist Research Conference (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy), Radical Film Network (Genova, Italy), Re-Thinking Agency: Non-Anthropocentric Approaches (Non-Anthropocentric Cultural Subjectivity Research Centre at the University of Warsaw, Poland), and L’eredità è una scelta. Dialoghi femministi a partire da salute, precarietà, sesso (Elvira Badaracco Foundation and Interdepartmental Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy).
In the last five years, she was a lecturer for a semester at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria and at the Department of Literature, Philosophy, Communication at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Moreover, she was invited to give lectures in the course of Cultural Studies, degree of Communication Sciences, at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and in the course of Sociology of the Family, in the Master of Social Work, at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy. She published on Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, on IAPh Italia (International Association of Women Philosophers), and with V&R unipress.

The thesis defense will be in English and will take place at the Academy at Schillerplatz in conference room.

We are looking forward to welcoming you.