CfP: VANDA Roundtable: Untying social suffering. Witnessing and reparation in the context of chronicity

Datum
16. Feb­ru­ar – 19. Feb­ru­ar 2027 

Round­table in the frame­works VANDA Conference

Round­table „Unty­ing social suf­fer­ing: wit­ness­ing and repa­ra­tion in the con­text of chronicity”
VANDA Conference
16 to 19 Feb­ru­ary 2027
Uni­ver­si­ty of Vienna

We are pleased to invite you to sub­mit an abstract for our round­table „Unty­ing social suf­fer­ing: wit­ness­ing and repa­ra­tion in the con­text of chronic­i­ty” at the VANDA Con­fer­ence, tak­ing place from 16 to 19 Feb­ru­ary 2027 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na. You can sub­mit your paper here until 12 Octo­ber 2026. The round­table is con­ceived as a space for col­lec­tive dis­cus­sion, and con­tri­bu­tions do not need to take the form of a fin­ished paper or ful­ly devel­oped argu­ment. The idea is to bring dif­fer­ent research inter­ests and expe­ri­ences into dia­logue, and explore con­nec­tions, ten­sions and ques­tions across our work. We hope to use the round­table for­mat to think togeth­er through ques­tions that may still be open, unset­tled or tak­ing shape.

Orga­niz­ers: Beat­riz Aragón Martín, Daniela Jacob Pin­to, Lucia Mair. Dis­cus­sant: Miri­am Tickin

Abstract: Social suf­fer­ing is cre­at­ed in many ways by the func­tion­ing of soci­eties we live in. This suf­fer­ing may be bod­i­ly, psy­cho­log­i­cal, moral and rela­tion­al, often ongo­ing, and not the result of spec­tac­u­lar events of vio­lence. Rather, it is embed­ded in the ways in which dai­ly life is repro­duced, in the worlds of work, in how care is giv­en or with­drawn. In this sense, social suf­fer­ing is unequal­ly dis­trib­uted through soci­ety, with cer­tain sub­jects and groups being more exposed to social suf­fer­ing, harm and pre­ma­ture death than oth­ers. This round­table intends to devel­op on this issue from the per­spec­tives of wit­ness­ing and repa­ra­tion. Indeed, med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers and anthro­pol­o­gists are also the wit­ness­es of the suf­fer­ing of their patients and inter­locu­tors: pain is not only an indi­vid­ual human expe­ri­ence but a demand for its recog­ni­tion (Das, 2007), and this moral rela­tion­ship is per­va­sive in med­ical prac­tice as well as the prac­tice of med­ical anthro­pol­o­gy. In this con­text, we seek to reflect on what it means to bear wit­ness to the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers (per­son­al­ly but also for the dis­ci­pline): what does it take to become a “wit­ness­ing pro­fes­sion­al” (Lip­ton 2026)? What forms of repa­ra­tion can be sought through the prac­tice of bear­ing wit­ness? What does it mean to repair in the con­text of struc­tur­al vio­lence? What forms of recog­ni­tion are pos­si­ble with­in this context?