Datum
15. April 2025
Cfp for a Panel
CfP for Panel: „Unstable Environments : Health and Healing in Remote Places”
Conveners: Meoïn Hagège, Laura Burke
Stream: Health and Environment
Until April 15th, 2025, individuals can submit proposals for panels and roundtables via the SUBMISSION PORTAL.
Abstract: This panel takes remote island landscapes of health and well-being as its starting point to discuss how areas, which are geographically, logistically and politically marginalised, abandoned or neglected, experience illness and healing and encounters with the State that emerge from seeking care. It explores the ‘environment’ as a wider social and physical space permeated by local and global inequalities inherited by colonial histories. It draws on Street’s description of ‘unstable places’, which are characterised by poor health infrastructure, institutional instability and medical uncertainty (Street, 2014). In such areas, biomedicine comes up against the limits of its practices and technologies (or lack thereof) and medicinal care must be continually reinvented and reimagined (2014,12). Rather than receiving life-saving or life-making healthcare, places might face ‘abandonment’ rather than assistance (Munro and Widmer 2023) or (un)intentional neglect (Beal et al. 2025). Places of instability, marginalised by state care structures and international assistance, logistical distance, and lack of technologies and human resources, redefine how illness and healing are experienced. How do marginalised communities living in unstable environments balance health and well-being with the risks of reaching treatment? What happens when treatment is out of reach due to long distances, costs, weather, and risky journeys? How does access to or abandonment from health and social care affect these spaces? Crucially how are health and the environment being reenvisioned in the process? Submissions should be empirical studies in the social sciences including but not limited to fieldwork in remote island spaces or isolated communities.
You can find the list of accepted panels and roundtables, including yours, here: https://mae.univie.ac.at/scientific-program
Furthermore, you can find the general submission guidelines here: https://mae.univie.ac.at/submission-guidelines