75th Media Anthro­pol­o­gy Net­work: „Meme­ing the Great Reset: Cir­cu­lat­ing post-COVID con­spir­a­cies in the UK Free­dom Movement”
Mon­day, 30 March to Sun­day, 12 April 2026
E‑seminar

Fur­ther details can be found here:

75. E‑seminar: Meme­ing the Great Reset: Cir­cu­lat­ing post-COVID con­spir­a­cies in the UK Free­dom Movement

We’ll be dis­cussing a work­ing paper from Dr Camp­bell Thom­son.> (King’s Col­lege Lon­don) titled „Meme­ing the Great Reset: Cir­cu­lat­ing post-COVID con­spir­a­cies in the UK Free­dom Movement”

The work­ing paper is now avail­able for down­load

On Mon­day, 30 March, I will open the sem­i­nar by intro­duc­ing our appoint­ed discussant(s) and invit­ing them to com­mence the dis­cus­sion by shar­ing their com­ments on the paper with the list. Fol­low­ing this, I will open the floor to all list mem­bers for fur­ther discussion.

We are excit­ed to cel­e­brate the 75th edi­tion of the Medi­aNet E‑seminar series with Campbell’s excel­lent paper, and we hope you will join the con­ver­sa­tion! Please feel free to share this event with col­leagues and stu­dents who might be inter­est­ed, and encour­age them to participate.

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CfP: „Liv­ing with Inflam­ma­tion: Inquiry into the Ontol­ogy and Pol­i­tics of Flammability”
Event Date: 9. 4. 2026 – 10. 4. 2026

Time and Place of Event: Aca­d­e­m­ic Con­fer­ence Cen­ter, Prague, Czech Republic

Orga­niz­ers: Tereza Stöck­elová and Hana Pork­er­tová (Insti­tute of Soci­ol­o­gy of the Czech Acad­e­my of Sci­ences) and Léa Per­raudin (Hum­boldt-Uni­ver­sität zu Berlin)

Keynotes: Har­ris Solomon (Duke Uni­ver­si­ty) and Andrea Ford (Uni­ver­si­ty of Edinburgh)

In con­tem­po­rary bio­med­i­cine, inflam­ma­tion has emerged as a cen­tral con­cept in under­stand­ing health and dis­ease. It is increas­ing­ly stud­ied as a phys­i­o­log­i­cal process under­ly­ing a wide array of conditions—from obe­si­ty and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease to neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­or­ders such as Alzheimer’s, as well as depres­sion and can­cer (Fur­man et al., 2019; Medzhi­tov, 2008). While acute inflammation—a tar­get­ed response to spe­cif­ic stres­sors or injury—is a vital and pro­tec­tive func­tion of the immune sys­tem, chron­ic low-grade inflam­ma­tion is now rec­og­nized as a source of long-term harm.

Con­sid­er­ing these devel­op­ments, Han­nah Lan­deck­er (2024) argues that inflam­ma­tion research has pro­found impli­ca­tions for under­stand­ing how soci­ety “gets under the skin.” She observes that “the inflam­ma­to­ry body emerg­ing from the stud­ies of adi­pos­i­ty and dia­betes is pro­duced by metab­o­liz­ing mate­r­i­al and psy­choso­cial con­di­tions.” In this way, social inequal­i­ties man­i­fest as inflam­ma­to­ry states—not as down­stream con­se­quences but as upstream con­di­tions of health disparities.

Atten­tion to inflam­ma­tion may, in turn, illu­mi­nate the intri­cate entan­gle­ments of bod­ies, ecolo­gies, and mate­r­i­al infra­struc­tures, draw­ing crit­i­cal atten­tion to the creep­ing con­di­tions of expo­sure, con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, and tox­i­c­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with anthro­pogenic inter­fer­ence (Alaimo, 2016; Chen, 2012; Libo­iron, 2021; Mur­phy, 2017; Naddaf, 2025; Shotwell, 2016). Inflam­ma­bil­i­ty may also serve as a pro­duc­tive lens for analysing the reac­tive (mal)functions of mate­r­i­al objects with­in tech­no­log­i­cal systems—whether solar bat­ter­ies, urban infra­struc­tures, or post-indus­tri­al land­scapes. While flam­ing com­bus­tion is a high-tem­per­a­ture chem­i­cal reac­tion prone to esca­lat­ing momen­tum, the cold­er burn and slow spread of latent, smoul­der­ing process­es invite reflec­tion on their tem­po­ral and mate­r­i­al thresh­olds (Per­raudin 2025).

Draw­ing on STS stud­ies of social topol­o­gy (de Laet & Mol, 2000; Mol & Law, 1994; Law & Sin­gle­ton, 2005), Pork­er­tová and Stöck­elová (2025) recent­ly intro­duced the notion of the inflam­ma­ble object to describe a spe­cif­ic capac­i­ty to “catch fire”: such objects embody both the poten­tial to erupt and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of frag­ile con­trol that pre­vents irre­versible dam­age. Inflam­ma­bil­i­ty is thus nei­ther ful­ly elim­inable; rather, it may serve as a har­bin­ger of sys­temic dis­tur­bance and com­plex­i­ty. The issue, then, is not one of erad­i­ca­tion but, to para­phrase Har­away (2016), of find­ing ways to live with the smoul­der­ing trouble.

We invite papers that exam­ine inflam­ma­to­ry or inflam­ma­ble objects across diverse set­tings, to explore the ana­lyt­i­cal pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of inflam­ma­tion (as a con­di­tion), flam­ma­bil­i­ty (as a qual­i­ty), and smoul­der­ing (as a process). How do these con­cepts relate, over­lap, or intra-sect with­in bod­ies, mate­ri­als, and ecosys­tems? Our aim is to ignite—and keep smouldering—a sus­tained con­ver­sa­tion that will cul­mi­nate in a spe­cial jour­nal issue.

Dead­line for abstracts (max. 300 words): 23 Jan­u­ary 2026

Sub­mit pro­pos­als to: hana.porkertova@soc.cas.cz

Select­ed par­tic­i­pants will be expect­ed to sub­mit a 3,000-word draft paper by 31 March 2026.

Papers will be shared with all par­tic­i­pants pri­or to the work­shop, and each paper will be assigned a discussant.
https://www.soc.cas.cz/en/events/conferences/living-with-inflammation-inquiry-into-the-ontology-and-politics-of-flammability

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One-day sym­po­sium on „Long Covid and Soci­ety” (in-per­son and virtually)

April 20, 2026
Colum­bia University 

The con­ver­sa­tion fea­tures soci­ol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, anthro­pol­o­gists, sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy stud­ies schol­ars, patient advo­cates, clin­i­cians, and sci­en­tists work­ing around issues relat­ed to Long Covid’s impact on social inequal­i­ties. We will also fea­ture researchers from Brazil and France to pro­vide glob­al per­spec­tives on Long Covid.

Speak­ers for the day include Lar­ry Au, JD Davids, Abi­gail Dumes, Gil Eyal, Emi­ly Lim Rogers, Emi­ly Menden­hall, David Scales, Meli­na Sher­man, Pierre Robic­quet, Andre Luiz Sica de Cam­pos, Renan Gonçalves Leonel da Sil­va, Ilana Löwy, Julia Moore Vogel, and more.

Learn more and reg­is­ter: https://longcov.id/society

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