Published Works

Forthcoming:
Dumit and O’Connor 2015. The Senses and Sciences of Fascia: a Practice as Research Investigation. In: Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human. Lexington Books.

Abstract:
1. The Senses and Sciences of Fascia: a Practice as Research Investigation
Joseph Dumit and Kevin O’Connor

In this paper we investigate fascia (connective tissue) as an object of ongoing scientific and therapeutic research through movement-based “practice as research,” participant observation and interviews. Fascia is viewed as a set of anatomical claims stretches between communities of biologists, massage therapists, doctors, anatomist and pathologists as well as somatic practitioners and dancers. Creating a Fascia Movement Research Lab we hypothesized that in experimenting with particular fascia research through movement-based practices, we would develop new kinds of questions about fascia and new ways of thinking about the body. This was confirmed. We were pleasantly surprised how often this also generated new ways of moving. Our work begins by attending to the training of sensitivity across divergent fields of fascia research and sinks lively into the viscous materialities of connections. In dialogue with performance studies, science and technology studies (STS) scholars and and movement research practitioners we explore and refigure embodiment, science, and habit.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6tqs1ehuupdq09z/Dumit%20OConnor%20Fascia%20September%2012p.pdf?dl=0

2. On Improvisation
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1349-improvisation

Dumit, Joseph, O’Connor, Kevin, Drum, Duskin and McCullough, Sarah. “Improvisation.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, March 29, 2018. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1349-improvisation

3. Wear Qisi-Become Seal
Wear Qisi, is a t-shirt design depicting Inuit life emerging from the cut open body of a seal. The design highlights the dynamic relationships between Inuit people, seals and the land in the community of Panniqtuuq (or Pang for short), Nunavut, Canada. Seals become Inuit and Inuit become seal through hunting, eating, storytelling and art making. The t-shirt shows the idea of a shared seal-human life world, and highlights the idea that someone, not something, continually dies for the continuation of life (and ways of living). In pointing to a relational ecology that grounds Inuit ways of knowing, it simultaneously pushing back against the decades long ban and curtailment of trade on seal fur in Europe and the United States.

Kevin O’Connor and duskin drum, two practicing performing artists and PhD students in performance studies at UC Davis write alongside Paulette Metuq, an Inuit graphic designer from Pang who created the final “Wear Qisi” image. In this essay, “Wear Qisi, Become Seal” they provide an ethnographic account of how the creative process involving the creation of the t-shirt design became an exploration into a set of complex questions concerning Inuit ways of life, especially in regards to human/seal co-relation. They place the “Wear Qisi” design alongside global warming discourse, and Inuit climate justice activist Shiela Watt-Cloutier’s international diplomacy, to highlight the ways the global world is always already threaded through Inuit-seal wording. By tracing the effects of colonialism, including global organic pollutants that move through seals into Inuit bodies, and based on Inuit responses to climate change, the writers argue, that we, who are not Inuit, are all potentially seal, in seal, of seal, through and for seal. The “Wear Qisi” design counters colonial designs by entangling the global world into Inuit-seal relations.

O’Connor, K., Drum, D., & Metuq, P. (2017). Wear Qisi-Become Seal. Performance Research, 22(2), 20-26.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13528165.2017.1315935?journalCode=rprs20