Just a short reminder of our panel on work and disability/chronicity at next year’s DGSKA (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie) conference in Munich (25–28 July 2023). We hope to create a platform for scholars interested in how people’s being at/in work relate to experiences of disability and chronicity, in particular in (but not restricted to) contexts of the Global South. Your contributions to the panel will hopefully lead to a special issue that taps into this (neglected) field.
Submissions (max. 200 words) should go to stefanie.mauksch@uni-leipzig.de. The Call for Paper runs until 15 December 2022. Please consider submitting an abstract and circulate widely.
Being in/ at Work: Repositioning Knowledge about Work, Disability, Chronicity (Workshop)
Disability and chronicity are terms that seek to capture biosocial experiences that intersect with, and affect, how people engage in work, labor or employment. This panel is focused on how people navigate disabling, debilitating and/or are enabling experiences in and through work, and how these experiences are shaped by the social localities from which they emerge. We place emphasis on how work becomes significant for people whose bodily conditions or appearances are produced as ‘other’ in respective societies, or who experience pain or chronic illness that delimit (but maybe also reshape or expand) their possibilities to contribute to communities and other social arrangements. Departing from the focus on work-related exclusion put forward in previous inquiries in anthropology and related disciplines, we attend to positive relations between occupational identities and work embodiments on the one hand, and experiences of disability and chronicity on the other. Exploring new angles on the interplay between ‘being disabled’ and ‘being in/at work’, we ask whether and how work ‘works’ as a form to abandon or to problematize constructions of disability. The workshop will bring together scholars who address one or more of the following concerns:
Co-Constitution: How are forms of disability and/or chronicity defined in connection to notions and ideas of work? And vice versa, how do disability and chronicity shape extant forms of labor?
Meaning-Making: How do people with disability and/or chronic conditions in different localities around the globe perform and talk about their work?
Critique: How can embedded understandings of disability, chronicity and work be brought to estrange the workings of administrative procedures, ideologies and political arrangements?
Reflection and Auto-Ethnography: To what degree is the labor of anthropologists shaped by ableist conceptions? Which potential does disability hold to explore exclusionary dimensions of anthropological work?
Best, Stefanie Mauksch
Institut für Ethnologie
Fakultät für Geschichte, Kunst und Regionalwissenschaften
Universität Leipzig
+49 341 97 37 227
stefanie.mauksch@uni-leipzig.de
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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
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?
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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
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