Embodied Transcendence with Bo-Mi Choi and Chris Giang

Please join us for an immersive, multisensorial co-learning and making experience, featuring conversation with Dr. Bo-Mi Choi and a sensorial experience presented by ceramicist, incense-maker, DJ, and tea-practitioner Chris Giang. Hands-on activities include preparing a silk scarf (provided) for tea-dying, tea ceremony, making personal flower arrangements to bring home. Critical reflection by Dr. Choi will engage the topic of the importance of presencing embodied (and other) ways of knowing in our places and habits of study. As both a critical theorist and a Zen practitioner, Dr. Choi will lead us in considering what it might look and feel like to integrate many ways of knowing as complementary strategies, especially as scholars in the arts & humanities and university contexts.

About the Speakers

Bo-Mi Choi is a Lecturer on Social Studies. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, where she taught in the Social Science core curriculum. Trained in Modern European intellectual history, her research focus is the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Born in Seoul, South-Korea, she grew up in Hamburg, Germany, where she studied law before she came to the United States to pursue a BA degree in Philosophy at Calvin College. A clergy member of the Kwan Um School Zen, she has been the faculty advisor for the Harvard Meditation Club since 2009. Her research interest has recently expanded to new theoretical approaches to science and technology and their political impact on democratic processes, social justice and diminishing possibilities for human flourishing.

Chris Giang is a multidisciplinary artist, DJ, and data scientist based on Oakland, CA. Her work aims to    create spaces and rituals of reflection and tenderness. Drawing from elements of traditional Chinese tea ceremony and her background in experimental soundscaping, she architects multisensory experiences of sociality, self-contemplation, and warmth.