2001, Motion and Emotion

The organizing theme of this year's Institute is "Motion and Emotion: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Affect and Movement." The concepts of motion and emotion are central to a wide range of disciplines yet are highly variable in their specific applications. For example, musicologists and physicists might study how sound is produced by physical movements; aesthetic theorists and neuroscientists might study how musical movements transport the listener. Political scientists, computer scientists, lawyers, and psychologists might analyze the dynamics of political movements or the ways that politicians move their constituents. Architects, industrial engineers, and kinesiologists might study how bodies move through space, or how the workplace affects bodily motions and emotional responses to it. Other scholars might look at the history of emotions, or at the ways that race, class, and gender have been correlated with certain forms of bodily movements. The motions of the stock market and accompanying emotional trajectories occupy the disciplinary lives of many in business, finance, mathematics and economics. Yet the sciences of physical motion and the physiological experience of human emotion are for the most part studied separately, despite their etymological linkages. Exploring the nexus of motion and emotion across the disciplines should result in inevitably interdisciplinary inquiries that build upon intercampus initiatives and discussion pertaining to interdisciplinarity.