Jul 25 – Jul 28, 2023
Families Managing Health and Wellbeing in Times of Crisis
Panel
Panel at the German Anthropological Association’s (DGSKA e.V.) biannual conference „Contested Knowledge: Perspectives in Social
and Cultural Anthropology” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Dear colleagues,
On behalf of the work group Medical Anthropology we warmly invite you to
our workshop at the German Anthropological Association’s (DGSKA e.V.)
next biannual conference „Contested Knowledge: Perspectives in Social
and Cultural Anthropology” (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München,
25–28 July 2023), see abstract below. The workshop will include a
keynote address by Prof. Sjaak van der Geest (Emeritus Professor of
Medical Anthropology, University of Amsterdam). Please send your
abstract of *max. 200 words* to a.bochow1@gmail.com and
dominik.mattes@fu-berlin.de *by 15 December 2022*. We look forward to
your contributions!
Best wishes,
Astrid Bochow and Dominik Mattes
—-
*Families Managing Health and Wellbeing in Times of Crisis*
AG Medical Anthropology
PD Dr. Astrid Bochow, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Dr. Dominik Mattes, Freie Universität Berlin
Postcolonial theory criticizes that knowledge about the body, health,
and wellbeing is deeply connected to varying forms of governmentality
and submission. Postcolonial ethnography, for instance, documents
contests over health epistemologies and authority in contexts of medical
pluralism and shows that families are crucial in the sense of “therapy
managing groups” that help mediate different health epistemologies
reconciling, for instance, social-spiritual with physical aspects of
healing. Families also partake in the negotiations around diverging
conceptualizations of health and well-being between individual patients
and biomedical institutions. Finally, families may mediate particular
forms of subjectivation pursued by state institutions, while themselves
subduing individuals to local forms of gender and age-related hierarchies.
Meanwhile, recent social phenomena such as long-term lockdowns during
the COVID-19 pandemic, dramatically rising daily living expenses,
growing numbers of people being forced to leave their home countries, as
well as environmental catastrophes reinforce public and scholarly
interests in families as resources of social and material care and
support for vulnerable people including children and elderly people. We
invite papers that reflect on how families shape health management in
these (and other) contexts of crisis where multiple forms of knowledge
and institutional expectations collide. Among others, they may address
the following questions:
How do family members mediate (competing) institutional knowledge, e.g.
related to nutrition, sports, medication but also loss and trauma?
Which sources and bodies of knowledge are deemed legitimate for what
reasons, and how are they negotiated?
Do daily health-related decisions reflect gender and age-related
hierarchies?
How do family members deal with governmental and other institutional
expectations concerning their role as central sites of caregiving?
Jul 25 – Jul 28, 2023
Troubled Knowledge: Health, Harm and the Environment in late Industrialism
Panel
Panel at the DGSKA (Deutsche Gesellenschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie) conference in Munich
Over the last decades, a growing number of scholars in the natural and
social sciences have shown the devastating health effects of
environmental pollution on humans and other living beings. Hydrocarbon
extraction, chemical pollutants within extensive plantation regimes as
well as the environmental effects of global supply-chains are only some
examples of contemporary economic, industrial, agricultural and medical
activities, which are deeply gendered and racialized. All this has
contributed to environmental degradation, the breakdown of biological
and social systems as well as the increase of chronic health problems,
hitting particularly the most precarious, in both the Global South and
North. While numerous public actors corroborate the validity of such
knowledge, other actors, however, contest not only the intertwinements
between environmental pollution and health issues but also its
anthropogenesis.
We wish to discuss in how far anthropological methods provide the
necessary time and depth to further knowledge on experiences and
relations through which growing levels of toxicity, pollution, and
atmospheric warming manifest as health is-sues, as well as to understand
the controversial and informal forms of knowledge production that
surround this. Therefore, we ask: Through which knowledge practices do
economic and political actors try to obfuscate the connections between
pollution, toxicities and human and more-than-human disease? Which role
does anthropological knowledge play in ongoing debates about the health
effects of late industrialism? How do people and activists on the ground
produce and spread de-colonial, anti-ableist, participatory and
collaborative knowledge about the relations between health and
environments? In which ways do daily living experiences, that
anthropological knowledge is based on, challenge and complicate existing
causative models about the dis/juncture between environmental pollution
and health effects in human afterlives?
Please send a text of max. 200 words directly to the workshop
organizers. Deadline: 15 December 2022
Giorgio Brocco
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
University of Vienna
Universitätsstraße 7 (NIG)
1010 Wien
Raum: C0412
T: +43–1‑4277–49535