Datum
23. April – 24. April 2025
CfP for Panel at 2025 Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference, UK
CFP below for a panel on „Intimate mediation: hormones and endocrine disruption across species, place, and time”
2025 Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference
Durham University, UK
April 23–24, 2025
Co-organised by Durham and Edinburgh universities and sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Society (RAI)
The call is scheduled to close on 13 January, although we will keep this under review and extend if it seems necessary.
Abstracts can be submitted via the Abstract Management portal. The website includes guidance and a list of panels a proposer can select from.
Panel #21: „Intimate mediation: hormones and endocrine disruption across species, place, and time”
Keywords: hormones, chemicals, endocrine disruption, EDCs, plastics, prescription drugs, side effects, alterlife, green chemistry
This panel invites consideration of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) as a key link between health and environment. EDCs are synthetic chemicals that interact with the hormonal messaging processes of humans and other animals, commonly found in everyday items, notably many plastics. These ubiquitous substances transcend local environments through weather patterns and industrial chains, defy consumer rationales of personal protection through „organic” or „green” choices, and have effects that are unpredictable and may remain latent for generations. EDCs are now constitutive of our bodies, complicating any ideas about an un-altered „pure” state, and have been linked to health issues as disparate as diabetes, endometriosis, asthma, early puberty, obesity, and gender dysphoria. There is good reason to consider hormonally-active pharmaceuticals as EDCs, particularly given how they can exceed the consumer’s bodily system and enter into waterways and other shared environments. EDCs trouble standard political positions around individual autonomy and choice, complicating conservative impulses towards protectionism and immunity. Studying „the exposome” troubles standard ways of making knowledge about chemicals: chemical effects come into being in interaction with one another instead of as isolated variables, and timing of exposure often matters more than dosage (counter to the toxicological maxim ‚the dose makes the poison’). Add to this the lobbying pressure from petroleum and chemical industries, and it is clear why it can be profoundly difficult to acknowledge and take action about EDCs. Yet, some medical research centers, activist groups, artists, and even industrial initiatives around „green chemistry” are doing so. This nexus begs further anthropological inquiry.