Creating futures: Revisiting (the transformation of) care networks in African countries
Panel
Panel at the European Conference on African Studies at the University of Cologne
Short Abstract:
Formal and informal care networks are increasingly emerging in African countries as a way of creating solidarities and making futures. We ask what/who constitutes this future and for whom, how social networks come to be imagined, constituted, engaged, negotiated, and contested.
Long Abstract:
Social networks are crucial in confronting crisis and securing African futures. African countries are witnessing a proliferation of different forms of formal and informal care networks emerging in the context of growing health, ecological and environmental crises. Ranging from religious and neighborhood networks to self-help groups and professional solidarities, these collectives are increasingly taking a center stage as forms of distribution and sharing in the current era of the changing dynamics of the relationship between citizens, the state and the market, health and socio-economic crises, and global financialization. A growing middle-class population and new digital and mobile technologies are interacting within registers of a long history of mutual aid societies in African contexts shaping social networks in different ways. Meanwhile, the state is seemingly taking a central role in experimenting/expanding social and financial protection through different mechanisms such national health insurance schemes and cash transfer interventions, which, in turn are opening up ways of bringing people together in varied forms. Alongside these, social and economic havoc, precarity, and growing inequalities (health, economic, social), increasing marketization and access to credit continue to shape and challenge solidarity, while taking new meanings across different generations, classes, and genders in different contexts. People increasingly become part of networks as a way of creating solidarities and making futures. We ask what/who constitutes this future and for whom, how social networks come to be imagined, constituted, engaged, negotiated, and contested.
Please submit your paper proposal here.
https://ecasconference.org/2023/programme#12488
We look forward to your submissions!
Convenors
Jacinta Victoria Muinde (University of Oslo)
Edwin Ameso (University of Leipzig)
Ruth Prince (University of Oslo)
Chair
Lena Kroeker (Bayreuth University)
Plantes médicinales et médecines du 21ème siècle
Andere
Fortbildung der Société Française d’Ethnopharmacologie
Medical Precarity in Uncertain Times: Understanding Contemporary Healthcare Design, Malfunction, and Collapse
Panel
Panel at the 16th international SIEF congress in Brno, Czech Republic
Psychology and Anthropology in a Changing World
Konferenz
Hybrid Conference of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology at the University of Oslo
The conference is meant as an inclusive forum for scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and thematic orientations. Critical perspectives on the concepts of mainstream psychology are encouraged; productive engagements across the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology and cognitive science, psychiatry, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and others will also be welcome.
The conference will be preceded by the Writing Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars. The organizers will be able to offer several needs-based travel support stipends to students and early career scholars covering the extra night of the pre-conference.
Further information and updates can be found at: https://enpanthro.net/enpa2023- conference/. If you have any further questions regarding the conference and the workshop, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers at conference@enpanthro.net
Beyond Binaries: Gender, Sexuality and Medicine in Post-War Europe
Konferenz
A conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics and Society, University of Hamburg at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Submission Deadline: 6th March 2023
How can gender and sexuality – broadly conceived both methodologically and thematically – help to inform historical understanding of the role of medicine in post-war Europe? This conference will bring together scholars working in different disciplines to examine how theoretical approaches incorporating gender and sexuality can shed light on medical ethics, scientific practices, and policymaking associated with health across the ideological divide. How can histories of gender and sexuality illuminate individual medical experiences and the complex relations between patients, doctors, policymakers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical ethicists during the Cold War period?
We are particularly interested in papers which examine gender, sexuality, and medicine in Central and Eastern Europe in order to gain greater insight into how medicine was imagined, managed, sold and experienced across Europe. Exploring gender and sexuality in the context of post-war medicine can help us to discern potential similarities in medical practices, policies, and experiences across Europe, which moves beyond the security context and ideological differences of the Cold War to highlight the exchange of scientific ideas across the “Iron Curtain”. Examining gender, sexuality and medicine in the post-war period can bring about a new scholarly perspective on Europe as a continent that was to some extent united by shared experiences, policies, and beliefs.
Please send a 250-word abstract and title, together with your institutional affiliation and a brief bio, to Dr Kate Docking and Dr David Peace by 6 March 2023. Accommodation and meals for accepted speakers will be provided by the conference organisers. The conference proceedings will be published in an edited volume.
Subjects of papers might include, but are certainly not limited to:
– Reproduction: abortion, contraception, reproductive rights, sexology
– Prophylaxis: vaccination, healthcare campaigns
– Clinical trials and human experimentation
– Medical experiences of trans‑, non-binary, and queer persons
– Concepts of normality, enhancement, disability, and pathology
– Gendered natures and implications of ethical codes
– Gender inequalities in access to medical care and health responsibilities
– Representations of gender and sexuality in media and the arts
– Forms of protest and resistance: patients, professional groups
– Role of data science and genetics in targeted medicine
– Psy-disciplines: psychology, psychiatry, psychodrama, psychoanalysis etc
– Theoretical reflections on the writing of gender and sexuality
kate.docking@uni-hamburg.de
Psychoanalyse und Körper: Berührung
Konferenz
13. Wiener Symposium »Psychoanalyse und Körper« an der Sigmund-Freud-Privatuniversität in Wien
Das Thema Berührung ist wohl eines der strittigsten im Spannungsfeld von Psychoanalyse und Körperpsychotherapie. In der als ›Redekur‹ konzipierten psychoanalytischen Behandlung ereignet sich körperliche Berührung in der Regel nur im konventionellen Kontext von Begrüßung und Verabschiedung. Berührung figuriert hier in einer allgemeineren Bedeutung, etwa im Sinne der emotionalen oder gestisch-mimetischen, leiblichen Einwirkung aufeinander. Im Gegensatz dazu teilen Körperpsychotherapeuten mehrheitlich die Meinung, konkrete körperliche Berührung sei ein wesentlicher Bestandteil einer therapeutischen Zugangsweise, die das körperliche Geschehen innerhalb der Psychotherapie wirklich ernst nimmt. Sie sprechen von »heilsamen Berührungen« (Günter Heisterkamp).
Die Unterschiedlichkeit der Perspektiven hat eine lange Tradition und besteht seit Freud. Sie hat jedoch an Aktualität nichts eingebüßt. So schreibt der durchaus körperbezogen denkende Psychoanalytiker Sebastian Leikert, mehrfach Vortragender am Wiener Symposium »Psychoanalyse und Körper«, in seinem 2022 erschienenen Buch »Das körperliche Unbewusste in der psychoanalytischen Behandlungstechnik«: »Die faktische taktile Berührung ist verzichtbar, denn die Stimme der Analytikerin oder des Analytikers berührt das Körperselbst, die gemeinsame Aufmerksamkeit berührt das Leibliche, das resonante Spüren der leiblichen Gegenübertragung hat eine Wirkung auf das Körperselbst der Analysandin oder des Analysanden. Abstinenz ist in der Arbeit mit leiblichen Konstellationen zentral, weil hier Verletzlichkeit und Gefahr der Retraumatisierung besonders groß sind« (S. 14).
Unschwer ist zu erkennen, wie weit die Positionen auseinanderliegen. Während sich allgemein in den Behandlungstheorien so manche Übereinstimmungen finden, zeigen sich an dieser Stelle in der Konzeption der therapeutischen Situation und des therapeutischen Rahmens Spannungslinien und Kontroversen, die gerade in ihrer Grundsätzlichkeit nach einem interkollegialen Diskurs suchen. Wie steht es also um die Bedeutsamkeit konkreter körperlicher Berührung bzw. des Verzichtes darauf? Und wie wären in diesem Kontext z.B. Ergebnisse der Säuglings- und Bindungsforschung in Betracht zu ziehen?
Auf der Tagung werden wir dieses Spannungsfeld aus vorwiegend klinischer Perspektive beleuchten. Sechs Referentinnen und Referenten werden aus ihrer jeweiligen therapeutischen Zugangsweise heraus eine Patientin / einen Patienten vorstellen, zentriert um die Frage, wie jeweils therapeutische Veränderung möglich war, wie also die Patientin / der Patient in seinem Innersten berührt werden konnte.
Der interkollegialen Diskussion wird auf dieser Tagung breiter Raum gegeben. Praxisbezogene Workshops ergänzen das Angebot.
Termin
23. bis 25. Juni 2023
Veranstaltungsort
Sigmund-Freud-Privatuniversität
Freudplatz 1
A‑1020 Wien
Anmeldung und Information per Peter Geißler peter@geissler-info.at oder 0043–699-11874690 oder über die Tagungshomepage www.psychoanalyseundkoerper.at
“Ageing contested”. Exploring anti-ageing bio-hacking and repair practices in later life
Panel
Panel at the STS Italia Conference at the University of Bologna
Organizers: Francesco Miele (1); Michela Cozza (2)
1: University of Trieste, Italy; 2: Mälardalen University, Sweden
Topics: Everyday life and design of the mundane; Algorithmic knowledge, media ecologies and artificial intelligence; Innovation imaginaries, practices and policies; The value of science, technology, innovation and research practices; Heterogeneous assemblages in biomedical research
Keywords: Anti-ageing, bio-hacking, gerontechnologies, socio-material practices.
Over the last decades, the nexus between biological ageing and functional decline has been more and more ‘contested’ (Vincent, 2006), especially by critical scholars – among them, also STS scholars – committed to emancipating from biological and psychological naturalisations of age categories. The relationship between ageing and technoscientific innovation can be analysed by focusing on the constellations of socio-material practices through which the relationship itself is performed. Our panel aims at exploring material-discursive textures associated with ageing, by focusing on two interrelated macro-topics.
The first topic refers to the so-called bio-hacking, defined as the use of “science-based tools and shortcuts for optimizing your own biological potential” (Lee, 2015: 8) and for maximising longevity. In line with processes of biomedicalisation of the body (Cozza et al., 2022), discourses and initiatives related to bio-hacking populate online communities and social movements, which generate, share, and reproduce technoscientific practices to counteract and reverse ageing (e.g., the quantified-self movement). Scientific communities and markets are also involved in extreme anti-ageing practices to extend lifespan (e.g., gene editing). The phenomenon of bio-hacking relies on neoliberal principles which, in turn, dictate the ultimate goal of enhancing the human body through technologies that ‘improve’ its otherwise deteriorating functionalities well beyond what is actually necessary to sustain or repair the body itself.
From the first topic descends the second focus related to a process that we would call repairing ageing. In this case, we bring attention to the maintenance of aged human bodies, rather than to deep manipulative interventions upon them. We may refer to the softest forms of anti-ageing medicine to cure diseases associated with old age and to extend life expectancy as much as possible (Vincent, 2006). The underlying ethic of care induces patients, families, and clinicians to refrain from saying “no” to medical solutions as embodying a promise of better ageing (Kaufman, 2004). In parallel, also most of assistive gerontechnologies aim at repairing the effects of ageing processes on the human body, matching with an imaginary of older people as ‘in need’ of being helped, in accordance with the ideals of ‘independent living’ in later life.
Having this framework as our starting point,here is a not exhaustive list of indicative topics that might be considered:
- Enhancement technologies for aged human bodies.
- Hacking age.
- Repairing practices in later life.
- Algorithmic elderly care.
- Ageing and self-quantification.
- Assistive technologies and emerging care practices.
- Ageing and neo-liberalism.
- Ageism in design practices.
- Clinical interventions and life-extensions.
- Ethical dilemmas related to bio-medical anti-ageing interventions.
References
Cozza, M., Kirsten L. E., and Katz S. (2022). Hacking age. Sociology Compass, 16(10), e13034.
Kaufman, S. R., Shim, J. K., and Russ, A. J. (2004). Revisiting the biomedicalization of aging: Clinical trends and ethical challenges. The Gerontologist, 44(6), 731–738.
Lee, J. (2015). The biohacking manifesto: The scientific blueprint for a long, healthy and happy life using cutting edge anti-aging and neuroscience based hacks. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Vincent, J. A. (2006). Ageing contested: Anti-ageing science and the cultural construction of old age. Sociology, 40(4), 681–698.
Interesting worlds as matters of caring and commoning
Panel
Panel at the 9th STS Italia Conference in Bologna
https://eventi.unibo.it/stsitalia2023/panel-26
The deadline for abstract submission is January 15, 2023.
Please, find below the details.
Organizers: Mariacristina Sciannamblo (1); Maurizio Teli (2); Giacomo Poderi (3)
1: Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; 2: Aalborg University; 3: IT University of Copenhagen
Topics: Knowledge co-creation, citizens science, co-design processes, material publics and grassroot innovation; Methodological challenges in a more-than-human world; Everyday life and design of the mundane; The value of science, technology, innovation and research practices; Extractivist powers, imaginaries and asymmetries; Building alliances in public participation and engagement
Keywords: caring, commoning, collaborative research, co-design, engagement
The concept of ‘interest’ has been central in STS since its inception (Callon and Law 1982; Callon 1982), when it was introduced to describe networks of relationships between human and non-human actors through the employment of devices, the development of interpretations, and the mobilization of alliances. The discussion of the formation of interests and its related processes of translation has brought the issue of power, and its reconfiguration(s), under the spotlight, as meaningfully articulated by Callon through the questions: “Who speaks in the name of whom? Who represents whom?”.
More recently, the increasing prominence of critical approaches – e.g. feminist and postcolonial STS – and the intersections with cognate research fields – e.g. participatory design, information science, environmental humanities – have stressed the politically engaged character of STS which emphasized its ‘activist interest’ (Sismondo, 2008). That has spurred the emergence of a „collaborative turn” in STS (Farías, 2017) that we see as a direct consequence of STS concerns with power. The collaborative turn has brought about questions on the ethical, affective, and political dimensions of researching by means of collaborative and committed action-research projects based on dialogue, mutual learning, and caring relationships within heterogeneous collectives.
These concerns have been troubled and further elaborated by feminist thinking in STS, in particular with the prolific reflections on the concept and practice of care (Mol et al. 2010; Martin et al. 2015), which emphasize the ambivalent, situated, and material character of care as well as our own care and concerns as STS researchers and practitioners (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).
In parallel, STS research has explored the importance of the commons whether these are natural, material, human made, or immaterial (Papadopoulos 2018). Commoning practices can indeed be considered matters of care as they attend to everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world (Tronto 1993). Additionally, commoning prompts us to reconsider human-nature and more-than-human relationships in ways that challenge dominant existing extractive capitalist models, towards “the production of ourselves as a common subject” (Federici 2018). These allow us to stay with the troubles that attend to matters of care and the related implications of unpacking the logics, contradictions, and multiple ruptures generated by capitalism. Against this backdrop, we hope to make visible the neglected and often invisible labor of reproducing the commons, and to question which and whose material, political, and ethical orders come into play when researching and intervening in/for the commons.
This panel invites presentations that explore the intersections between caring and commoning in the context of STS intervention-oriented research. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome. These may include (but are not limited to):
- disciplinary intersections among STS, design, and commons/-ing studies;
- knowledge co-creation, co-design processes, material publics and grassroot innovation;
- ICT, labor, and precariousness;
- theories and methodological approaches as forms of caring and commoning;
- complexities, opportunities, and contradictions of making new alliances between researchers, activists, local populations, and institutions;
- sites of ambivalence and contradictions in caring and commoning practices.
Interesting Worlds to Come. Science & Technology Studies facing more-than-human
Konferenz
9th STS Italia Conference hosted by the University of Bologna, Italy
The list of relevant panels:
Panel 5. ‘Outbreak’: Science, governance, and responding otherwise to challenges to come.
Panel 29. Materiality and research in museums of science, technology, and medicine.
Panel 36. Diagnosis, prognosis, treatment – Towards fair and sustainable care provisions in health systems and pharmaceutical innovation.
Panel 41. More-than-human medicine? Unpacking the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in healthcare settings.
Panel 44. Exploring Promising Technology in Neuroscience.
Natur machen: Wissen, Praktiken und Technologien der Umweltgestaltung in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
Workshop
Interdisziplinärer Workshop am Historischen Seminar der Universität Siegen
Die 1950er Jahre gelten als Zäsur der Umweltgeschichte. Davon zeugen Schlagworte wie jene des „1950er Syndroms“ (Pfister), der „Großen Beschleunigung“ (McNeill/Engelke), aber auch des Anthropozäns, dessen Beginn bisweilen auf die Nachkriegszeit datiert wird. Die tiefgreifenden Umwälzungen gesellschaftlicher Naturverhältnisse gingen indes einher mit einem weniger beachteten Wandel des Stellenwertes „der Natur“ innerhalb industrialisierter Gesellschaften. Auch wenn sich der Beginn dieser Entwicklung auf verschiedenen Feldern bereits in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ausmachen lässt, war Natur ab den 1950er Jahren flächendeckend nicht mehr etwas, von dem es sich zu emanzipieren galt, noch etwas zu Konservierendes. Vielmehr rückte das Herstellen von Natur in den Fokus – Natur wurde auf eine jeweils neue Weise problematisiert, in politische Rationalitäten integriert und erhielt spezifische Funktionen.
Exemplarisch dafür kann die Geschichte des Naturschutzes in beiden deutschen Staaten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg betrachtet werden. In der Bundesrepublik stand der sogenannte „Glasglockennaturschutz“ in der Kritik, die planerisch-gestalterische Landespflege setzte sich als Modernisierungsangebot durch. Ganz ähnlich galt in der DDR der konservierende Naturschutz als Relikt bürgerlicher Naturästhetik und wurde in die Landschaftspflege – bald „sozialistische Landeskultur“ – integriert. Aus Naturschutzgebieten wurden „Freilandlaboratorien“, Wissenspraktiken wie jene der Vegetationskartierung ließen sich in ein anwendungsorientiertes Forschungsprogramm zur (Re-)Konstruktion von Ökosystemen umschreiben.
Die an diesem Prozess beteiligten Akteure begründeten die Notwendigkeit Natur herzustellen – ob großflächige Landschaften oder kleinteiligeres Stadtgrün – oftmals damit, dass sie etwa ökonomische, medizinische und ökologische Funktionen erfülle. Darunter fielen mit jeweiligen Konjunkturen solche der Erholung sowie gesundheitspolitische Aufgaben im Allgemeinen oder auch solche der Regulation von Umweltmedien sowie des Klimaschutzes. Lassen sich manche dieser Vorstellungen bis um die Jahrhundertwende zurückverfolgen, wurden sie nun verwissenschaftlicht in umfängliche Planungsprozesse übersetzt. Natur galt aus dieser Perspektive als Mittel gegen jene negativen Effekte, die mit der „Großen Beschleunigung“ verbunden wurden. Dafür bedurfte es jedoch nicht nur Natur-Wissen, sondern eine anhand dieses Wissens gestaltete Natur. Nicht selten war dieser Zugriff auf die äußere Natur des Menschen verknüpft mit Vorstellungen seiner inneren Natur. Etwa dann, wenn eine dem Menschen naturgemäße Umwelt gefordert wurde, da sie der gesellschaftlichen Regulierung diene. Naturpolitik und ‑gestaltung sind in diesem Sinne auch als Regierungs- und Sozialtechnologien zu analysieren.
Natur machen beschreibt dieses heterogene Ensemble. Im Zentrum stehen Wissensformationen, Praktiken und Technologien wie etwa jene der Renaturierung und ‑kultivierung, der Landschafts‑, Stadt- und Humanökologie, der Ingenieurbiologie und Landschaftsplanung, des Arten- und Biotop- sowie des Prozessschutzes. Deren Beginn fällt zwar bisweilen in die erste Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Systematische Forschung, umfängliche Anwendung und Institutionalisierung erfuhren sie in der Regel jedoch erst ab den 1950er Jahren. Darin unterscheiden sie sich von Eingriffen in den Landschafts- und Naturhaushalt im Allgemeinen sowie von länger eingeübten Praktiken, etwa der Melioration. Es geht nicht um die „Eroberung der Natur“ (Blackbourn), sondern um ihre bewusste (Re-)Konstruktion in Form artifizieller Natur-Replika. Ein Beispiel dafür ist die seit den 1970er Jahren verstärkt auszumachende Praxis der Flussrenaturierung, die auf eine jahrhundertealte Praxis der Begradigung reagierte. Gerade darin zeigt sich indes die Widersprüchlichkeit des Natur Machens. Einerseits lassen sich diese neuen Naturen nur als techno-sozio-naturale Assemblagen denken, andererseits erfüllen sie ihre Funktion als Simulakrum darüber, dass sie ihre sozio- und technogenen Anteile verschleiern. Auch daher gingen Prozesse der Herstellung häufig einher mit ontologischen und ethischen Debatten darüber, was Natur ist – und was sie in der industrialisierten Gesellschaft sein soll.
Der Workshop will sich diesem Thema aus verschiedenen Perspektiven nähern und sucht nach Beiträgen aus den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften, die obige Gedanken aufnehmen. Sie können sowohl theoretisch als auch empirisch ausgerichtet sein und sich auf die Geschichte des Natur Machens im gesamten 20. Jahrhundert beziehen. Neben historischen Fallstudien etwa der Rekultivierungs- und Renaturierungspraxis – von devastierten Flächen des Tagebaus über Stadtbegrünung bis zur (Wieder-)Herstellung von Ökosystemen – und ihrer Rezeption interessieren auch Analysen obiger Disziplinen und Praktiken. Aus theoretischer Perspektive stellen sich etwa Fragen der Materialität und hybriden Ontologien innerhalb der Prozesse des Natur Machens sowie auch nach der Anwendbarkeit von in jüngerer Zeit diskutierten Konzepten wie jenem der Öko-Gouvernementalität.
Vorschläge für einen Vortrag (20 Minuten) im Umfang von ca. 300 Wörtern sowie ein kurzer akademischer Werdegang werden bis zum 31. Januar 2023 erbeten per E‑Mail an: martina.huttner@uni-siegen.de
Vorbehaltlich zur Verfügung stehender Mittel können Reise- und Übernachtungskosten übernommen werden.
Für Fragen stehen die Organisatoren des Workshops zur Verfügung:
Prof. Dr. Noyan Dinçkal, Europäische Wissens- und Kommunikationsgeschichte der Moderne, Universität Siegen (dinckal@geschichte.uni-siegen.de)
Dr. Philipp Kröger, Geschichte der Gegenwart, Universität Siegen (philipp.kroeger@uni-siegen.de)
Being in/ at Work: Repositioning Knowledge about Work, Disability, Chronicity
Panel
Panel at the DGSKA (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie) conference in Munich
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
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
Troubled Knowledge: Health, Harm and the Environment in late Industrialism
Panel
Panel at the DGSKA (Deutsche Gesellenschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie) conference in Munich
The Psychology of Religion in an Entangled World
Konferenz
IAPR conference in Groningen
Scholars in the Psychology of Religion (PoR) employ different disciplinary and methodological perspectives to study diverse topics, such as lived spirituality, religious diversity and health and wellbeing. Challenges such as globalization, climate change and shifting power structures make many of these topics increasingly complex. The PoR requires new horizons to tackle them: novel methodological tools, theoretical insights, collaborations and a critical reinterpretation and decolonization. This conference aims to bring together experts who can offer fresh perspectives to the PoR because of their unique methodological approach or (inter)disciplinary background and who will inspire the field to address today’s challenges in new ways.
To explore new horizons for the PoR, we have invited keynote speakers from different disciplinary backgrounds who, in their research, all focus on current societal and scientific challenges. Their keynotes will engage in dialogue with the PoR and offer new perspectives on religion, mental health and stress resilience; extremism, terrorism, and conflict; climate change and environmentalism; and religion, gender and diversity.
https://www.netherlands.iaprweb.org/
Reproductive technologies and the Remaking of Life and Death
Konferenz
International conference by TechnoDeath at Aalborg University in Copenhagen
The increasing global development and use of reproductive technologies have prompted reproductive scholars within the social sciences and humanities to raise questions regarding how family, kinship, race, gender, sexuality, and disabilities intersect. Such studies have focused not least on how the selection of gametes, children, and parents takes place during medical treatment. Overall, these studies have illustrated how reproductive technologies are always technologies of biopolitics, as they potentially reflect on the governing of both life and death. Meanwhile, compared to how reproductive technologies are seen to remake life, the technological remaking of death has yet to be granted the same amount of scholarly attention.
At this international conference, we want to recenter the focus of reproductive studies to explore how technologies remake death as it intersects with life. We hope to engage in a range of different cases regarding how life and death emerge and are understood, such as during the cryopreservation and storage of gametes, in studies of family planning, in the use of prenatal screening, and in technologies involved in miscarriages, fetal reduction, abortions, still births, births, neonatal care, and infant death. We thereby hope to unpack how death emerges in relation to technologies involved, how cells, fetal tissue, and bodies that are dead become managed, and how people live with deaths after they have terminated a pregnancy or experienced infant death. We hope to bring forward embodied stories of how technological remaking’s of life and death are experienced, unpacking these stories in relation to how reproductive inequalities and current local and global forms of reproductive and population politics unfold.
We invite contributions to think about and relate to questions such as the following:
How does technology remake death and dying at the beginning of life?
How are colonial pasts, as well as racialized and gendered perceptions of bodies, entangled in the use of technologies of life and death at the beginning of life?
What bio- and necropolitical practices are involved in the population politics at stake globally regarding bodies that are enabled to either live or die?
How does the cryopreservation of gametes relate to life and death, given that the suspension of life is enabled?
How does technology shape experiences and politics regarding abortion globally?
As medical staff, what is it like to work with technologies enabling life and death?
How are abortion and fetal reduction experienced by pregnant persons?
How are technologies entangled with affect or emotions during the process of making life and death?
How do legal and medical technologies intersect as perceptions of quality of life are assessed in decisions on whether to allow someone to live or die?
How are technologies used to manage the deaths of fetuses and infants in maternity wards and neonatal intensive care units until the burial or disposal of the body, and what norms of affect and grieving are implied?
How do parents who have lost a child or terminated a pregnancy live with the remaking of death and dying through technologies?
How can technologies of life and death at the beginning of life be theoretically conceptualized?
What are the methodological challenges of studying technologies of life and death at the beginning of life?
Kind regards,
Associate Professor Stine Willum Adrian and PhD fellow Laura Louise Heinsen
https://www.kultur.aau.dk/forskning/forskningsgrupper/caf/technodeath/konference
AGEM-Jahrestagung 35 – Krisen, Körper, Kompetenzen. Methoden und Potentiale medizinanthropologischen Forschens
AGEM-Veranstaltung
35. Jahrestagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ethnologie und Medizin (AGEM) in Kooperation mit dem 20. Arbeitstreffen der Kommission Medizinanthropologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (DGEKW) im Warburg-Haus in Hamburg
Krisen und die Rede von Krisen haben Konjunktur. Neben Umwelt‑, Versorgungs‑, und Finanzkrise haben nicht zuletzt die Verbreitung von SARS-CoV‑2 und die damit verbundenen erheblichen sozialen, politischen, gesundheitlichen und wirtschaftlichen Folgen vielen vor Augen geführt, wie fragil Gesellschaften und gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt sind. Krisen- und Liminalitätserfahrungen stellen soziale Ordnungen in ihren alltäglichen Selbstverständlichkeiten in Frage und sind im sozialen Wandel bspw. an Übergängen des Lebensverlaufes wie Geburt, Schuleintritt, Pubertät, Berufswahl, Partnerschaft, Kinder, Ruhestand oder drohender Tod selbst alltäglich. Als persönliche Krisen können sie das Leben erschüttern, z. B. durch die Diagnose einer unheilbaren oder chronischen Krankheit oder durch den Verlust eines nahestehenden Menschen und Risse in der eigenen Biographie verursachen, die, neben unvorhergesehenen Ereignissen, durch intersektionale soziale Marginalisierungen, bspw. im Kontext von Disabilities, verstärkt werden. In der gegenwärtigen Situation spitzt sich die Frage nach den in Krisen eingebundenen Körpern weiter zu.
Mit dieser Tagung richten wir den Fokus auf die medizinanthropologische Erforschung der alltäglichen Erfahrungen und körperlichen Dimensionen von Krisen. Wir fragen nach den Verkörperungen permanenter Krisenerfahrungen und Modifikationen der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung und des Erlebens, die in ihren Folgen selbst im Gesundheitssystem relevant werden, ebenso wie nach deren Bewertungen im Spannungsfeld von Degeneration und Resilienz als verlorene oder gewonnene Kompetenzen. Gleichzeitig fragen wir nach den Potentialen medizinanthropologischen Forschens und laden dazu ein, methodologische Fragen gegenstandsbezogen zu diskutieren. Zentral für diese Diskussion sind unter anderem kollaborative und partizipative Forschungsansätze, die die konventionelle Dichotomie der Forschenden und der zu Erforschenden hinterfragen. Die medizinanthropologische Forschung zeigt, wie Gesundheitsideen und ‑praktiken soziale Ungleichheit nicht nur zum Ausdruck bringen, sondern auch perpetuieren und verstärken können. Mögliche weitere Fragen sind, welche Herausforderungen sich bei der Erforschung körperlicher Erfahrung und sinnlicher Wahrnehmungen für das ethnographische Schreiben ergeben, welche methodologischen Neuerungen, die vor allem durch die pandemische Ausnahmesituation entstanden sind, das qualitative Forschungsspektrum der Medizinanthropologie erweitern und welche neuen Wege zur Reflexion digitaler Forschungsmethoden sich eröffnet haben.
Keynote: Prof. Dr. Hella von Unger (LMU München).
Die Tagung ist interdisziplinär ausgerichtet und wendet sich an Wissenschaftler*innen aus Ethnologie, Europäischer Ethnologie/Kulturanthropologie, Medizinanthropologie, Soziologie, Geschichte, Geschlechterforschung, Medizin, Religions- und Medienwissenschaft sowie angrenzenden Disziplinen. Dabei möchten wir explizit auch Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen einladen, sich am interdisziplinären Austausch zu beteiligen. Die Tagungssprache wird Deutsch sein.
Interessierte werden gebeten, ein Abstract ihres Vortragsthemas (500 Wörter) zusammen mit einer Kurzbiographie bis zum 1. Mai 2023 an folgende Adresse zu senden: info@agem.de
Socialist Governmentality? Healthcare, technologies of the self, and subjectification in European state socialism, 1945–1990
Workshop
Workshop at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine – Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin
The two-day workshop aims to discuss the question, whether and how Michel Foucault’s ideas on liberal (and capitalist) “governmentality” can be productively applied on contemporary or historical socialist societies. It intends to take a closer look at governmentality, not from the perspective of policy makers or the power apparatus, but by using the example of healthcare in post-1945 Socialist Europe.
Socialist Governmentality? Healthcare, technologies of the self, and subjectification in European state socialism, 1945–1990
After the collapse of the Cold War two-bloc system in 1989/90, historiography and social sciences tended to sharply contrast post-World War II socialist and non-socialist societies. Recently, the focus has shifted to a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective interested in differences as much as parallels, including intersections and convergences between the two systems. Some even ask, if the Iron Curtain might not be better described as a permeable Nylon Curtain. In this context, a more general question has emerged: whether and how Michel Foucault’s ideas on liberal (and capitalist) “governmentality”, first formulated in 1977/78, can be productively applied on contemporary or historical socialist societies. After all, at first glance the liberal and individualized technologies of the self stand in sharp contrast to the ideologically shaped and administratively mediated formation of a “socialist personality”.
It is hardly controversial that the Foucauldian concept of “biopolitics” – securing and enhancing “life” of the governed “population” – is a very useful tool for analyzing both socialist and non-socialist government policies when it comes to, for example, birth regulation and pronatalism, agricultural policies or preventive healthcare regimes. “Governmentality” as defined by Foucault, however, characterizes a kind of biopolitics which seems to be specifically connected to a way of live in neoliberal-democratic and capitalist societies. The concept focuses on “private” lifestyles (diet and physical activity, sex, emotions, etc.). The shaping of individual behavior and subjectivity through a “conduct of conduct” ensures that the individual’s striving for autonomy and their capacity for self-control, self-reliance, and reflexivity serve the (presumed) common good. Governmentality, then, describes how self-conduct simultaneously “governs” others by governing oneself in ways that are desirable for the polity and acceptable to the governed.
In the last decades, the concept of governmentality helped to understand how neoliberalism made citizens responsible for the former tasks of the postwar-welfare state and how the market redistributed those tasks to the individual (subject). From this theoretical standpoint, governmentality seems incompatible with socialist ideology, state control, physical repression, and the prerogative of the collective. In recent years, however, we learned that pursuing a bottom-up perspective can provide additional or even deeper insights into the complexities of socialist realities. This is the aim of the proposed workshop: To take a closer look at governmentality, not from the perspective of policy makers or the power apparatus, but by using the example of healthcare in post-1945 Socialist Europe.
We propose to explore concrete examples from everyday healthcare settings – in psychological counseling, clinical social work, and community medicine, in treating chronic diseases and in preventive healthcare, in school education and the workplace, in healthy leisure activities, and in shaping a happy family life. What mechanisms of dissemination, reception, and mediation of self-techniques can be found and analyzed? Were elements or patterns of governmentality transferred from the West to the East or do we also find “home-grown” inventions? Were socialist societies more “liberal” than they realised and wanted to be? If so, what does this mean for the way we look at governmentality in “Western” societies?
The workshop will be held in Berlin on September 13–14, 2023. We plan this to be a fairly small group of people to make the discussions as open and lively as possible. To facilitate a productive discussion, we invite papers from ongoing research that will be distributed to participants (and commentators) in advance. Expenses for travel and hotel will be covered. We welcome abstracts in English of no more than 300 words. Please send an abstract and a short CV by e‑mail (henriette.voelker@charite.de) by December 19, 2022.
The workshop is organized by Dr. Alexa Geisthövel and Laura Hottenrott (both ERC Leviathan) and Prof. Dr. Viola Balz (FOR “normal#verrückt”). We gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Research Council (ERC Grant 854503) and the German Research Foundation (DFG FOR 3031). Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
Kontakt
alexandra.geisthoevel@charite.de
laura.hottenrott@charite.de
viola.balz@charite.de
volker.hess@charite.de