As I walk through campus this fall, I am excited by the start of the 2022-2023 academic year and the energy of reconstituting our UCI community. The annual theme for the Humanities Center - “Worldmaking through Embodiment” - reflects this sense of renewal.
What does worldmaking mean to me? It evokes a fundamental desire to understand the world we live in and the world we wish to live in. This impulse to understand and imagine is a long-standing humanistic desire. However, it also has been deepend by our collective experience of living through a pandemic. How might we create the world anew, having lived through a dystopic world?
What does embodiment mean to me? It foregrounds the centrality of our bodies, encouraging us to be aware of our entire selves, not just the rational mind, but also our physical, sensory, and emotional selves. Again, the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened for many of us the importance of being aware and listening to our bodies.
Bringing together the concept of worldmaking and embodiment leads me to ask:
How do we imagine our place in the world?
How do we create worlds in our imagination?
And how do our bodies - the way we dress, move and experience sensations - express and inform our ideas about our place and relationship to the world around us?
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Director, UCI Humanities Center
Faculty Profile
Learn more about Professor Wu and her research:
Centering the human experience: Judy Tzu-Chun Wu to lead UCI Humanities Center [link]
(UCI School of Humanities News, 9/10/2020)
Title IX's legacy at 50: UCI professor pens first biography of Patsy Mink, author of Title IX [link]
(UCI School of Humanities News, 4/14/2022)