Samantha Frost, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Filmed on Thursday 20th July 2017.
This talk considers the ways in which epigenetic processes both make possible and mediate a living body’s engagement with its habitat. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s account of the index as a non-symbolic sign, I suggest that we can conceptualize epigenetic processes as indexical. In doing so, we can discern that the body has a capacity for perception and meaning-making at the molecular and cellular level.
