Pan­el “Embody­ing the Immea­sur­able: Mate­r­i­al Prospec­tions on Pain, Ill­ness, and Suf­fer­ing in Crisis”
Part of the track “Method­olo­gies Anchored in Design, Pro­to­types, and Mate­r­i­al Cre­ation” at the XVI ESOCITE Con­fer­ence (Aso­ciación Lati­noamer­i­cana de Estu­dios Sociales de Cien­cia y Tecnología)
June 24 to 26, 2026
Bogotá, Colombia 

In times of glob­al crises—pandemics, con­flicts, envi­ron­men­tal disasters—pain, ill­ness, and suf­fer­ing tra­verse bod­ies, sens­es, and mate­ri­al­i­ties. This pan­el invites explo­ration of how the human is con­sti­tut­ed under these extreme con­di­tions and how the (in)material, togeth­er with Futures Design, can offer tools to envi­sion and project pos­si­ble envi­ron­ments and sce­nar­ios that shape the expe­ri­ence of suf­fer­ing (Fry, 2009).
We wel­come sub­mis­sions address­ing these issues from diverse the­o­ries of sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and epis­te­mo­log­i­cal approach­es: embod­ied cog­ni­tion (Varela, Thomp­son & Rosch, 1991); phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal and med­ical anthro­pol­o­gy approach­es (Rouse, 2009; Klein­man, 1997, 2020; Biehl, 2005); the exis­ten­tial dimen­sion and bod­i­ly vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty (Cos­melli, 2025); as well as the inter­ac­tion between tech­nol­o­gy, mate­ri­al­i­ty, and invis­i­ble worlds, show­ing how envi­ron­ments and objects shape expe­ri­ences that tran­scend the tan­gi­ble (Espíri­to San­to, 2020,2021,2025) and crit­i­cal analy­ses of pow­er rela­tions and ontolo­gies of the human (Povinel­li, 2021).
The STS com­mu­ni­ty is invit­ed to con­tribute papers that cre­ative­ly and rig­or­ous­ly con­nect expe­ri­ences, the­o­ries, and projections—such as applied projects, media-based work, the­o­ret­i­cal papers, and lit­er­a­ture reviews—that con­tribute to crit­i­cal think­ing in Futures Design, inte­grat­ing expe­ri­ences, the­o­ries, and mate­ri­al­i­ties to gen­er­ate new hori­zons in rela­tion to pain, ill­ness, and suffering.

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Rober­ta Raf­fae­ta: Health at the Human–Environment Inter­face: Micro­bial Entanglements
26.06.2026
3 PM (CET)
On Zoom

Reg­is­tra­tion:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/mae-seminars-microbial-entanglements-with-prof-roberta-raffaeta-tickets-1990949447392
Direct Zoom link: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/97711162536

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CfP: Democ­ra­cy as Health; Work­shop and Edit­ed Vol­ume; June 29–30, 2026, Geneva

Call for papers for a work­shop tak­ing place next sum­mer, which intends to lead to an edit­ed vol­ume, titled ‘Democ­ra­cy as Health.’ This event will take place in Gene­va on June 29–30, 2026, orga­nized by myself and Pro­fes­sor Aditya Bharad­waj from the Gene­va Grad­u­ate Insti­tute. We have the hon­or to be joined by keynote speak­ers includ­ing Pro­fes­sors Jes­si­ca Mul­li­gan, San­dra Bärn­reuther, Jan­i­na Kehr, and Ruth Prince. 

The full call for papers is avail­able at the link below, and attached. We encour­age ethno­graph­i­cal­ly ground­ed per­spec­tives across all con­texts. Abstract sub­mis­sions of up to 500 words should be sent to Robert.Smith@graduateinstitute.ch no lat­er than Jan­u­ary 5th, 2026. The work­shop is in per­son. Par­tial fund­ing stipends are avail­able for par­tic­i­pants on a need-based basis. Par­tic­i­pants should indi­cate their inter­est in finan­cial sup­port at the time of their appli­ca­tion. Should you have any ques­tions, please also feel free to reach out to me directly.

CfP:

Glob­al­ly, pub­licly fund­ed health­care has become increas­ing­ly politi­cized with­in demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es over the past decades. Rang­ing from the politi­ciza­tion of the Unit­ed States’ Afford­able Care Act dubbed ‘Oba­maCare,’ the resis­tance to the increas­ing pri­va­ti­za­tion of the Unit­ed Kingdom’s Nation­al Health Ser­vice, pop­ulist polit­i­cal brand­ings of health­care infra­struc­tures in South Asia, or cit­i­zen activism across con­texts, health has increas­ing­ly entered demo­c­ra­t­ic agen­das. Con­trast­ing from 20th cen­tu­ry polit­i­cal move­ments around health­care that gar­nered momen­tum through spe­cif­ic dis­ease cat­e­gories, such as HIV-AIDS (Biehl 2004) or afflic­tion of specif­i­cal­ly mar­gin­al­ized pop­u­la­tions (Petry­na 2013), con­tem­po­rary politi­ciza­tions are increas­ing­ly mobi­liz­ing broad visions of ‘health’ for elec­toral gains (Kehr, Muinde, and Prince 2023; Coop­er, 2019). In many set­tings, such politi­ciza­tions take the form of one-off schemes that are typ­i­cal­ly polit­i­cal­ly tem­po­rary and par­tial in nature, rely­ing on decades of state neglect in health­care to be per­ceived as suc­cess­ful by the elec­torate. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, this ris­ing elec­toral-politi­ciza­tion of health ser­vices and pro­grams also takes place with­in con­texts of ris­ing health austerity. 

There­fore, in this work­shop, we seek to use this emer­gence of health as an explic­it object of elec­toral-polit­i­cal agen­das to think through the con­tem­po­rary rela­tion­ship between democ­ra­cy and health, and more broad­ly the pol­i­tics of bio-pol­i­tics. The con­cept of ‘pol­i­tics,’ most broad­ly, has been a long­stand­ing con­cern for med­ical anthro­pol­o­gists’ engage­ment with patients’ expe­ri­ences, and under­stand­ings of pow­er. Sem­i­nal­ly, Foucault’s notion of ‘biopol­i­tics’ has pro­vid­ed a con­cep­tu­al foun­da­tion for med­ical anthro­pol­o­gists to make sense of how process­es of sub­jec­tiviza­tion take place with­in health’s domains, and the gov­ern­men­tal appa­ra­tus­es that ani­mate those process­es. Notably, biopo­lit­i­cal­ly inspired frame­works of pol­i­tics have shaped how anthro­pol­o­gists engage with how patients mobi­lize patho­log­i­cal-bio­log­i­cal iden­ti­ties to place cit­i­zen­ship claims upon the state (Rose and Novas 2005; Biehl 2004; Petry­na 2013; Tick­tin 2011 Nguyen 2010), how bio­med­ical knowl­edge can be used to claim author­i­ty in state spaces (Adams 1998), or how med­i­cine is mobi­lized as a sym­bol of nation­al moder­ni­ty (Broth­er­ton 2012; Al-Dewachi 2017). Yet, neigh­bor­ing dis­ci­plines have point­ed out that the use of pol­i­tics in this lit­er­a­ture may risk con­fin­ing itself to the realm of the bio­log­i­cal, and can “under­mine the polit­i­cal” as an ana­lyt­i­cal cat­e­go­ry by dis­count­ing how oth­er forms of pol­i­tics inter­sect with biol­o­gized pol­i­tics of health (Bird and Lynch 2019). Over­all, the con­cept of ‘pol­i­tics,’ often quick­ly glossed through the ‘pol­i­tics of health,’ main­tains a degree of ambiva­lence in the can­non of med­ical anthropology.

In response, this work­shop seeks to bring togeth­er lead­ing schol­ars to ethno­graph­i­cal­ly think through this in a way that is gen­er­a­tive of nov­el con­cep­tu­al for­mu­la­tions to under­stand the con­tem­po­rary rela­tion­ship between democ­ra­cy and health. Democ­ra­cy, in this sense, while ground­ed in process­es of elec­toral-pol­i­tics, is not empir­i­cal­ly con­fined to the prac­tice of vot­ing nor the rit­u­al of elec­tions, but seeks to account for the dif­fer­ent realms of the polit­i­cal that work along­side, with­in, and through, and are also con­struct­ed by, the pol­i­tics of health. In approach­ing these ques­tions, we aim to more explic­it­ly bring togeth­er lit­er­a­ture in med­ical and polit­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gy. Doing so par­tic­u­lar­ly takes stalk of how con­cepts of polit­i­cal, affec­tive feel­ings of polit­i­cal exis­tence, and the mate­r­i­al-spec­tral real­i­ties of the state inform sub­jec­tiv­i­ties towards health and care (Aretx­a­ga 2003; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Can­dea 2011; Pos­tero and Eli­noff 2019; Steet 2012; Volle­bergh, Kon­ing, and March­esi, 2021). This inter­sec­tion presents oppor­tu­ni­ties to engage with dif­fer­ent read­ings of biopol­i­tics. Specif­i­cal­ly, ear­ly Fou­cauldian ideas of locat­able, tan­gi­ble ‘veins of pow­er’ — as pos­si­ble to see with­in bio­med­ical clin­ics — as well as lat­er Fou­cauldian ideas that pow­er is every­where — as pos­si­ble to see with­in polit­i­cal affects — which need align­ment in order to under­stand con­tem­po­rary for­ma­tions of democ­ra­cy as health. 

This edit­ed vol­ume revolves around the idea that, amidst ris­ing fas­cist, author­i­tar­i­an ten­den­cies that rely upon health as an elec­toral-polit­i­cal tool, it is increas­ing­ly urgent to reimag­ine the rela­tion­ship between democ­ra­cy and health. This vol­ume will seek to revolve around the fol­low­ing cen­tral questions: 

· How does democ­ra­cy reimag­ine the idea of health as an optic, a good, a right, a ser­vice, and more, in rela­tion to the state and the pri­vate sector?
· What do demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es do to the fig­ure of the clin­ic and how does it mod­u­late its gaze?
· What does the rela­tion­ship between democ­ra­cy and health do to imag­i­na­tions and rela­tion­al­i­ties between states and subjects?
· How does health’s elec­toral-polit­i­cal uptake trans­mit into the realm of patient expe­ri­ence, sub­jec­tiv­i­ty and embodiment? 

Full CfP as PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x2s1TAuj-E5nbcM9c9GBcbhC3xF0kMWp/view?usp=drive_link

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