Läuft. Die Ausstellung zur Menstruation
Ausstellung
Ausstellung im Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Berlin)
„Läuft. Die Ausstellung zur Menstruation“
06.10.2023 bis 06.10.2024
Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Etwa 2 Milliarden Menschen auf der Welt menstruieren. Über 1,5 Milliarden weitere Menschen hatten ihre Periode oder werden sie bekommen. Seit rund 10 Jahren nun wird die Menstruation in Europa öffentlich diskutiert. Das MEK präsentiert die Ausstellung dazu.
„Läuft“ zeigt eine Geschichte des Pragmatismus und der Utopien, des Erfindungsreichtums und Aktivismus. Dafür versammelt die Ausstellung rund 100 historische und brandneue Menstruationsartikel sowie Werbeanzeigen. Schaubilder, Interviews und Hands-On-Stationen vermitteln den aktuellen Wissensstand. Mit knapp 200 Alltagsgegenständen, Fotos, Grafiken, Zeitungsartikeln und Social-Media-Posts fächert die Ausstellung die Diskurse auf, die Menstruierende seit Jahrzehnten begleiten: Es geht um Themen wie Leistung, Periodenarmut, Müll, „Normalität“, Naturverbundenheit, Stimmung und einige mehr – und natürlich um Aktivismus! Denn im Zentrum stehen die Stimmen und Erfahrungen von Menstruierenden selbst. Wir laden dazu ein, ihnen in Interviews zu lauschen und sich selbst auszutauschen. Filmausschnitte, Musik und Kunstwerke runden die Ausstellung ab.
Mehr Infos unter http://www.smb.museum/flow.
Visual anthropology exhibition: Faces of Hypnosis
Ausstellung
Exhibition in London
Visual anthropology exhibition: “Faces of Hypnosis”
LSE Atrium Gallery
Houghton Street, London (WC2A 2AE), UK
11 Nov – 20 Dec
Open from 10am to 8pm from Monday to Friday, and admission is free.
“Faces of Hypnosis” combines 31 ethnographic photos, 45 minutes of video installation, and over 30 artefacts and artworks to explore hypnosis and the lives of the people who practice it. It has a particular focus on hypnotists living in Indonesia, thereby examining how ideas about the mind, consciousness, trance, and therapy are construed and enacted by citizens of a Muslim-majority country in the Global South. The exhibition could support teaching in psychological anthropology, medical anthropology, or visual anthropology.
You can access further details here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2024/11/20241111/Faces-of-hypnosis
Casey Golomski: God’s Waiting Room: Images of Care in Poetic Form
Workshop
Webinar of the series “Images, Ageing and Care”
Casey Golomski: „God’s Waiting Room: Images of Care in Poetic Form”
Webinar of the series “Images, Ageing and Care”
9th December, 18:00–19:30 CET, 17:00–18:30 GMT, 12:00–13:30 Eastern
Cati Coe will moderate the discussion
Zoom: https://carleton-ca.zoom.us/j/93360548693 Meeting ID: 933 6054 8693
ABOUT THE TALK: A new work of creative nonfiction, God’s Waiting Room (Rutgers University Press and Wits University Press) flips the script on racial discrimination in US long term care, showing how older ‘racist’ whites and their black nurses find grace together among their ghosts and despite the odds. Set thirty years after apartheid in South Africa, it features the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island Prison nurse as well as stories of queer older adults and healthcare providers, teaching us how racism, ageism, and sexism impact where we end up, who cares, and what matters in the end. While grounded in seven years of ethnographic research, the book is narrated as taking place in a single day and employs color photos and visually striking elements of poetic form, translation, and prose. This seminar offers a window into the author’s creative process, situating these narrative elements within histories of imagistic and ethnographic poetry and relating the book to recent imagistic approaches in the anthropology of aging, care, and the Otherwise.
BIO: A creative writer and cultural and medical anthropologist, Casey Golomski is a Department Chair and Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire, with visiting appointments at the universities of Pretoria and the Witwatersrand. He is the author of the book Funeral Culture (Indiana University Press) and many articles, special issues, and poems in anthropology, African and Black studies, and literary journals.
ABOUT THE WEBINAR SERIES ON IMAGES, AGEING AND CARE: This webinar series – free and open to all- gathers anthropologists and image-makers interested in exploring the ontological and epistemological connections between images, aging and care, treating the relationship and these phenomena as requiring and inviting interrogation. It is sponsored by the Images of Care Collective, the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology and the Life Course (AAGE), EASA’s Age and Generations Network (AgeNet) and the Network for Visual Anthropology of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). You can see our past webinars here.
To be informed about the next webinars, sign up for the mailing list by clicking here.
Looking forward to seeing you all there,
Barbara Pieta, Cati Coe, Paolo Favero and Martina Laganà
Modern Metaphysical Hypnosis
Vortrag
Lecture / performance ethnography
Modern Metaphysical Hypnosis
lecture / performance ethnography
17:30 – 19:00
Thai Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building
54 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3LJ
10th December, come to LSE for a taste of how Indonesian hypnotists are integrating longstanding ritual traditions with emergent understandings of psychology, technology and biofeedback. This session, which blurs the formats of a lecture and participatory performance ethnography, will include a live demonstration of ‘Modern Metaphysical Hypnosis’ and will give attendees the opportunity to ‘see’ inside their own minds, as well as to reflect on the anthropological implications of these innovative forms of hypnotic practice. (Audience participation is strictly optional).
The event is free, but due to capacity constraints, advance ticketing is required. To attend, please book here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/lse-hypno-anthropology/t‑lnggqep
“Testing under crisis / Testing the crises”
Workshop
In Person Workshop at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Workshop on “Testing under crisis / Testing the crises”
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
12–13 Dec 2024
A public health crisis, especially an epidemic, and the responses
formulated to address it are interwoven with a wide range of medical,
social and political interventions. The aim of the CrisisTesting
International Workshop is to bring together novel perspectives with
regards to the study of public health crises by attending to the role
of the development and use of diagnostic tests, to the emergence of a
multitude of testing practices and to the materialities associated
with testing infrastructure.
By bringing into dialogue interdisciplinary perspectives from the
history of science, technology and medicine, the social sciences, the
medical/health humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Media
Studies and other relevant fields, we would like to explore the
significance and crucial role of testing for medical practice and
public health policy-making. The workshop has a double focus. On the
one hand, it explores the social appropriations of testing in diverse
settings and public health crises.[1] On the other hand, it
investigates possible radical changes in the history and the sociology
of testing practices, be it either about testing that “occurs inside
the social environment” or about testing that “involves the very
modification of social environments”.[2]
We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the
following research questions:
● How testing is being used by governments/public health
authorities to inform public health interventions and to measure their
performance?
● How can we better understand the sociotechnical tradeoffs of
testing during a crisis?
● How does the design of the testing infrastructure favor
certain public health policies in relation to the allocation of
available resources? Does the configuration of testing, afforded by
technological infrastructure, respond to the dynamics of health
crises?
● How do cases of contested testing practices affect public
health policy and the appropriations of testing in society?
● What happens in cases of disruption to the supply of
consumables that affect testing capacity? How does the availability or
lack of testing resources and associated infrastructure impact
clinical practice and policy-making during a crisis?
● In which ways testing (and screening) shapes subjectivities
and collective identities? How are the notions of health and illness
being (re)shaped by testing?
● How different uses of testing and different tests are being
promoted, judged or challenged by public health authorities and the
media in the context of science communication?
● In which ways the social preferences are reflected in the
balancing between the level of testing specificity and sensitivity?
This is the first of two workshops to be organized in the context of
the research project “Testing under crisis, a history from HIV/AIDS to
Covid-19: between public debates and health policies – CrisisTesting”
(2024–25). The aim of these workshops is to provide a space for
discussion and meaningful exchanges on the aforementioned topics. Our
plan is to publish an edited volume with contributions addressing
diverse aspects of medical testing in the context of public health
crises. The second Workshop will take place in autumn 2025.
Those interested in presenting their work, please send your abstract
(approx. 250 words) and a brief biographical note (approx. 150 words)
to crisistesting@phs.uoa.gr by the 10th of September 2024. The two-day
workshop will take place in the premises of the National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens and it is an in-person event.
Participation is cost-free; the refreshments and meals are covered by
the organizers. In exceptional cases, we will try to accommodate
hybrid solutions (virtual participation).
The workshop is organized by the research team members of the
CrisisTesting project: Katerina Vlantoni (Principal Investigator),
assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and History of
Science, NKUA; Athanasios Barlagiannis, researcher in the Modern Greek
History Research Centre, Academy of Athens; Eirini Mergoupi-Savaidou,
postdoctoral researcher; Marilena Pateraki, postdoctoral researcher;
and, Kostas Raptis, postdoctoral researcher.
[1] Beaudevin, C., Berlivet, L., Boudia, S., Bourgain, C., Cassier,
M., Gaudillière, J‑P., & Löwy, I. (2021). ‘Test, Test, Test!’:
Scarcity, Tinkering, and Testing Policy Early in the COVID-19 Epidemic
in France. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 8(2), 1–31.
https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.8.2.5116
[2] Marres, N., & Stark, D. (2020). Put to the test: For a new
sociology of testing. The British journal of sociology, 71(3),
423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468–4446.12746
Details: https://crisistesting.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CfP-CrisisTestingWorkshop.pdf
The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19
Workshop
PhD students only cross-disciplinary in-person workshop in New Delhi
CfP „The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19”
December 13, 14, and 15, 2024
Abstract submission deadline: August 31, 2024
PhD students worldwide from across the social sciences and humanities are welcome to submit abstracts related to (re-)emergent modes of governance and the governance of health and illness during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. During the workshop, we will reflect on reconfigurations of the notion of „global” health and the reshaping of care infrastructures.
Students may respond to either of the following topics, regardless of their academic training or discipline:
Local realities of the (post-)pandemic landscape: This panel has an ethnographic focus, zooming in on situated configurations of health, illness, and governance during and after COVID-19.
The (post-)pandemic biopolitics of global health: This panel has a biopolitical focus, inviting conceptual reflections on social care, power, territorializations, populations, and citizenship; exploring the biosocial forms of life emerging during and after the pandemic.
Please see the attached CfP for further details.
Submission Details:
Submit your abstracts to: escavanblarikom@gmail.com; tcc9@cornell.edu; yasmeen.arif@snu.edu.in
Workshop Schedule:
December 13: Public event and keynote in central Delhi; dinner will be provided.
December 14–15: Roundtables and student presentations; accommodation and hospitality on campus (Shiv Nadar University) will be provided.
We are able to offer limited travel support for students traveling from outside of India and within India. Please note that this support may not fully cover roundtrip expenses for international students.
The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19
Workshop
New Delhi-based workshop
“The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19”
December 13,14, and 15th, 2024
New Delhi
Shiv Nadar and Cornell University are excited to invite doctoral students to participate in our upcoming workshop in New Delhi, India, exploring “The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19”.
Call for Papers: “The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19”
Doctoral students from around the globe are welcome to submit a 500-word abstract responding to one of two themes, as explained below, before the deadline of the 31st of August 2024.
The Workshop
The COVID-19 pandemic threw taken-for-granted notions into (temporary) disarray; reterritorializing imaginations of “global” health, sharpening neocolonial relations and divides, transforming hemispheric vulnerabilities and reconfiguring the governance of illness and health. At the same time, one year after the WHO stopped considering COVID-19 a global health emergency, the longer-term effects of the event of the pandemic have not yet fully been accounted for.
Our New Delhi-based workshop, taking place in-person on December 13,14, and 15th, 2024, will be a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary laboratory of thinking about where the pandemic has left us and what could be future vectors of concern. A double foundation grounds the overall project – biopolitical approaches and located anthropological work. Few concepts gained as much traction in reflecting on the pandemic as “biopolitics”, as the relations between “life” and “politics” were rapidly reconfigured in the wake of emergency measures the COVID-19 pandemic instigated. At the same time, “biopolitics” soon became a contentious concept, dividing scholars in various ways across the political spectrum in the (post-)pandemic global health arena. The challenges were many, including but not limited to understanding immunities anew and rethinking governance under crises. Anthropological efforts across the world revised concepts such as care, social infrastructures, and community.
Through a biopolitical framework in conversation with anthropological and sociological perspectives, this workshop will enable a much-needed conversation between philosophical interventions and empirical research. Rather than smoothing over the fault lines that appeared in biopolitical thinking and among anthropological deliberations in particular geographies and ecologies during and post-COVID-19, we want to take these ruptures as a fertile starting point for a renewed, collaborative conversation, investigating potentially changed perceptions of illness, health, science, society and ethics.
The workshop intends to assemble scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to rethink the notion of biopolitics from the ruins of global health in the post-pandemic era. Engaging researchers from around the globe, we intend to investigate how the pandemic has recast understanding of the governance of health and populations in the global south and north.
Participating students are invited to engage in discussions with peers working on post-pandemic biopolitics and global health, as well as with the workshops’ roundtable panel members, who will provide reflections and questions on their work – offering students an opportunity to connect with leading international scholars on biopolitics and global health.
The Workshops Themes
We invite responses focusing on two themes, enabling a comparative analysis of pandemic realities to emerge.
Theme 1: “Local realities of the (post-)pandemic landscape”
On the first day of the workshop, we will zoom in on situated configurations of health, illness and governance. We are particularly interested in contributions that engage with the pandemic’s impact on care infrastructures and institutions, as well as social responsiveness. Contributions to this theme may be ethnographic or focus on context-specific narratives, events, spaces or experiences. The aim here is to provide snapshots of (post-)pandemic life.
Submissions to this theme may engage with one or several of the following questions:
- How has the pandemic reconfigured relations of care and governance between doctors and patients, institutions and subjects; and among neighbors and citizens?
- How can we understand, criticize and/or work with novel modes of surveillance, forms of citizenship, and population groups emerging through the event of the pandemic?
- How can we reflect on the specific temporalities brought about by the pandemic and after, including the blurring of the notions of crisis and chronicity; aging, the end of life, death and dying; and the experience of the everyday?
Theme 2: “The (post-)pandemic biopolitics of global health”
On the second day of the workshop, we will reflect on the biopolitics of post-pandemic global health with a focus on the conceptual or theoretical plane. Here, we are keen to receive contributions taking a distinctly philosophical and analytical approach, providing conceptual reflections on topics such as the social, care, power, territorializations, populations, and citizenship. These reflections will further a comparative discussion, exploring the biosocial forms of life emerging during and after the pandemic.
Submissions for this second theme may respond to the following questions or related themes:
- „What does ‚global’ mean, specifically in the context of ‚global health,’ when considering the different impacts at both territorial and local levels during and after the pandemic?
- How, if at all, has the pandemic reconfigured the domain of the social and the boundaries of population groups; in other words, transformed the object of biopolitics?
- What novel or renewed dimensions of living and dying, and affiliated forms of social and governance infrastructures, have emerged during and after the pandemic?
Submission guidelines:
Interested students are invited to submit an abstract (max. 500 words) before the 31st of August 2024.
Submissions must clearly indicate which theme they are responding to. Students from different backgrounds are encouraged to respond to any of the two themes regardless of their disciplinary training.
We will let participants know about our decision by the 20th of September 2024.
Queries about the workshop or the submission process may be sent to:
Submission may be sent to:
escavanblarikom@gmail.com; tcc9@cornell.edu; yasmeen.arif@snu.edu.in
Eligibility and audience
Doctoral students from across the globe working in the social sciences and humanities on related topics are welcome to submit abstracts. The workshop audience will consist of international scholars and non-academics who work in fields related to the biopolitics of global health post-COVID-19.
The first day (13th of Dec) will be a public event at a central venue in Delhi, dinner is included in that event. Accommodation and hospitality on campus during the final two days (14–15th of Dec) of the workshop will be provided.
We are able to offer limited travel support for students traveling from outside of India as well as within India. Please indicate in your submission whether you would like to be considered for this support.
The full student’ papers will be uploaded to the wider project’s digital repository (Cornell eCommons) after the workshop.
New Theories and Methods for Working with ‘Developmental’ Neuromedical Difference and Health
Konferenz
Online Symposium
Call for Papers: New Theories and Methods for Working with ‘Developmental’ Neuromedical Difference and Health
Online via Zoom
16 December 2024
Abstract Submission Deadline: 4 November 2024
This symposium addresses the need for innovative research methods and theories that critically engage with research based on lived experience, and confront the implicit ableism and Eurocentrism embedded in biomedical conceptions of neuromedical conditions.
Symposium Focus
We aim to explore the intersection of epistemology, ontology, and ethics in relation to neuromedical conditions or differences that are considered developmental in origin. These conditions may be approached as experiences, research objects, or political identities.
A key example of this debate involves autism and the divergent approaches in autism research. While one approach seeks treatments or cures for what are seen as individual deficits at the level of subjectivity, the other supports participatory and emancipatory research led by or with autistic individuals. In the second approach, autistic personhood and subjectivity are not questioned and the focus is instead on identifying sociocultural barriers to thriving. This symposium will consider whether resolving these disagreements can be ameliorated by further empirical work or if they are fundamentally normative (ethical and/or political or even cosmopolitical).
Themes and Questions
We invite discussions on whether neuromedical diagnoses inherently involve claims to universal epistemic perspectives or definitive ethical judgments, and who holds the authority to speak about neuromedical experiences and neurodivergent subjectivity. We are particularly interested in moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks to include socially diverse understandings of health, personhood, and agency.
The symposium seeks to challenge the prevailing biomedical narratives, questioning whether we can move past disagreements rooted in Eurocentric contexts and understandings of health and marginalization.
Call for Contributions
The symposium convenors, Dr. Anna Stenning and Dr. Cinzia Greco, seek contributors who can offer insights into developing theories and methods that enhance the reflexivity of empirical research on globally occurring neuromedical conditions or differences across diverse regions and positionalities.
We encourage papers on the following indicative themes:
Empirical:
Contributions that:
- Analyse the existing knowledge and claims to knowledge within the debates and controversies around neurodevelopmental conditions, and analyse how these are mobilised within the debates.
- Explore the apparent Catch 22 between positively identifying as autistic but struggling with health.
Theoretical/philosophical:
Contributions that:
- Explore how different empirical practices (pragmatism, positivism, hermeneutics) produce different kinds of knowledge claims and consequences for action.
- Identify the political and ethical positions within the debates and advance the understanding of the political context.
Explore whether efforts to categorize or diagnose conditions such as autism involve claims to a universal or objective perspective on human experience. - Explore how different approaches to research and intervention reflect underlying ethical and political values. For example, is there an implied ethical or political claim to prioritize lived experience and autonomy over medical or deficit-based perspectives, and on what basis is this claim made?
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract including a title and a 350-word summary of your proposed talk, which should be approximately 20 minutes in duration.
Participation
The symposium will be held online, with synchronous and asynchronous (pre-recorded) participation available to accommodate different time zones and accessibility needs.
Participants will be invited to contribute to an edited interdisciplinary collection of essays on this theme with work commencing in 2025.
We look forward to your contributions to this important and timely discussion.
Please send your abstracts to Dr. Anna Stenning anna.c.stenning@durham.ac.uk and contact Dr. Cinzia Greco cinzia.greco@manchester.ac.uk
For further inquiries, please contact anna.c.stenning@durham.ac.uk.
Food System Temporalities
Konferenz
Two-Day-Conference at University of Cambridge
Workshop „Food System Temporalities”
January 9th and 10th, 2025
University of Cambridge
Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Organisers: Elizabeth Fox (University of Cambridge) & Thomas White (King’s College London)
Keynote Speaker: Prof Heather Paxson (MIT)
This two-day conference seeks to examine the temporality of food production, circulation, and consumption. By highlighting how time and its reckoning shape and are shaped by the pursuit of the edible, our aim is to move beyond simplistic dichotomies between capitalist acceleration and slow food sustainability to elucidate food’s disjunctive rhythms and the work that goes into managing them.
Studies of food and food systems have tended to prioritise space, or place, over time. However, the production, circulation, and consumption of food are also inherently time-bound processes that involve numerous temporal regimes, the management of which require distinct forms of work. Producing edible things requires navigating seasons, growth cycles, market fluctuations, and food’s inherent perishability. We ask, for example, how does a temporal lens on growing, picking, slaughtering, storing, or fermenting lead us to reconceptualise the labour of making or metabolising the edible? How might questions of food sovereignty and food justice be approached differently with reference to time, rather than location? How are changes to seasonal rhythms caused by climate change affecting the ways food producers anticipate the future? Are new ‘time-less’ food labelling regimes changing attitudes to perishability and waste? What about the bodies of animals, pushed to mature at ever faster rates in the interests of profit or sustainability? We welcome empirical and theoretical interrogations of these and related questions.
Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words to Elizabeth Fox (ef434@cam.ac.uk) by August 31st 2024.
Carcinogenesis, Toxicity and the Epidemic of Cancer
Panel
CfP for Panel at Health, Environment and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference at Durham University
CfP for panel on „Carcinogenesis, Toxicity and the Epidemic of Cancer”
Health, Environment and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference at Durham University
23–24 April 2025
Deadline 13th of January
If you would like to join the panel, please submit an abstract of 250 words via the Abstract Management portal.
CFP: Carcinogenesis, Toxicity and the Epidemic of Cancer
The climatic and environmental changes brought about by the forces of industrialisation, capitalism, empire, and global ‘development’ are becoming increasingly visible. But vital too are changes wrought that are less visible – the chemical alterations induced in water, soil, air, crops, animal and human bodies that are having profound effects on health and wellbeing. Responsibility and consequences are distributed in deeply unequal ways (Choy 2016). In this panel we focus specifically on the carcinogenic effects of this toxicity. While scientific investigation into links between industrial environmental contamination and carcinogenesis has been underdeveloped in favour of that which foregrounds personal agency and individual choice, a growing body of anthropological scholarship has begun to reorient this research agenda. Drawing on examples such as peanut production in Senegal (Tousignant 2022), open-pit mining in Spain (Fernández-Navarro et al., 2012), nuclear waste disposal in the USA (Cram 2023 & Masco 2021), and agricultural pesticide use in Kenya (Prince 2021), scholars have started to probe the connections between corporate and industrial interests and the ‘epidemic’ of cancer, in an effort to think through the relationship between the living and its milieu in novel ways (Canguilhem 2001). We invite papers that advance these analyses of ‘carcinogenic accountability’, and examine how risks of carcinogenic exposure are made visible and invisible, embraced and resisted, and studied. We are particularly interested in research which undertakes semiotic and material cultural analyses of the following concepts: ‘exposed’, ‘toxic’, ‘safe’, ‘carcinogenic’, and/or interrogate the ethical, epistemic, and regulatory conjunctures within which these categories operate.
You do not have to be an RAI or ASA member to propose a paper.
Proposals should consist of:
- The title of the panel
– The title of the paper you wish to present
– An abstract of no more than 250 words.
Paper proposals must be submitted via the submission system and will be reviewed by panel convenors.
Influence of Changing Ecologies on Health and Human Adaptation at Local, National and Global level
Panel
CfP for a at Health, Environment and Anthropology (HEAT) 2025 Conference
CfP for a panel on “Influence of Changing Ecologies on Health and Human Adaptation at Local, National and Global level”
Health, Environment and Anthropology (HEAT) 2025 Conference
Durham University, (UK)
April 23–24, 2025
Panel Abstract:
In Anthropology, research on interactions and the complex network of humans, health and environment started early with the cultural ecology theory and medical anthropology in the 1930s and 1960s respectively. The focus theme of these approaches had been adaptation including factors of genetics, physiology, culture and the approaches assumed that health is determined by environmental adaptation and that diseases arise from environmental imbalances. Further studies are required to understand the consumption patterns which are associated with health risks affecting human biology, ecology and the epidemiology of emerging and reemerging diseases. As researchers, the pressing question is the present scenario of regional, national and global affairs such as climate change, food insecurity, environmental health, demographic shifts, etc. Though there are ongoing consistent efforts to identify strategies and bring out solutions, yet, it requires extensive studies on ecological changes and the associated health disparities. With this backdrop, the panel invites papers/studies conducted within (but not limited to) South Asia to explore the cross-cultural impact of ecological changes on populations. It seeks to highlight health disparities arising from these changes and have an in-depth discussion on regional-specific health implications, as well as include trends in research methodology. The panel, in conclusion, will be addressing the ‘Ecology-Human Adaptation Imbalance’ and will try to identify the loopholes and bring out probable alternatives for region-specific populations.
The panel will explore the extent to which changing environmental conditions bring about adverse health consequences and adaptive imbalance under various ecological conditions. The panel invites papers on the theme of ‘Ecology-Human Adaptation Imbalance’ in the context of the following areas:
Traditional and marginalised communities.
Urban ecology.
Food environment.
Demography and access to Public Health.
Ageing and Environment Interaction
Adaptation to ecological vulnerabilities.
You can submit your abstracts in the Abstract Management Portal on or before 13 January 2025. The abstract should not be more than 250 words and the above link provides further information on the process of abstract submission.
All papers must be submitted via the submission point on the conference website (below). This should be uploaded in .doc or .pdf format. Proposals must consist of:
Title of the panel you wish join;
The title of the paper you wish to present;
An abstract of no more than 250 words.
Paper proposals will be reviewed by panel convenor(s) and a decision on whether the paper has been accepted or rejected will come from them.
Only papers submitted via the link below will be considered by panel convenors.
Website Link- Event Durham – Abstract Management
Rules
You do not have to be an RAI or ASA member to propose a paper.
You may only present once at the conference. Panel chairs and discussants may also present a paper on a different panel.
All those attending the conference, including discussants and chairs, will need to register and pay to attend.
For any query, kindly contact us at:- karvileena@gauhati.ac.in
Livelihoods under pressure: Vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience in developmental contexts
Panel
CfP for Panel at Health Environment and Anthropology (HEAt) conference in Durham
CfP for Panel: „Livelihoods under pressure: Vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience in developmental contexts”
Health Environment and Anthropology (HEAt) conference in Durham
23 April–24 April 2025
The call for abstracts is open until 13 January
We invite paper abstracts of 250 words for our panel
Abstract:
This panel considers livelihoods at the intersections of climate change, environmental degradation, and global health crises. We aim to foster dialogue between medical, environmental and development anthropology by taking a bottom-up, ethnographic view on changing livelihoods whilst critically engaging with developmental concepts of livelihood diversification, sustainable livelihoods, and alternative livelihoods in a world where climate change adds new pressures as people struggle to get by.
People around the world are troubled by climate change, but many communities in the Global South are disproportionately affected by the convergence of emerging environmental and health challenges with long-standing socioeconomic vulnerabilities. They are also more commonly the targets of development projects that aim to encourage particular kinds of livelihood transition. Such communities have often relied on natural resource-dependent livelihoods that are increasingly threatened by climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation, and which may also pose heightened risks of emerging infectious diseases. However, often they also display tremendous agency and innovation in the face of these interconnected challenges. By centring our panel on livelihood strategies, and how these take place within, in conversation with, and beyond developmental framings, this panel will explore the lived experiences of those most affected by these planetary changes.
By examining diverse case studies from around the world, we aim to illuminate the ways in which communities are navigating, adapting to, and resisting the impacts of global climate change on their livelihoods and wellbeing. We also seek ethnographic insights into how programmes aiming to support livelihoods are received or reworked on the ground.
Please email to hannah.brown@DURHAM.AC.UK if you have any questions. Panel abstracts must be submitted via the conference management system.
Best wishes,
Hannah
More-than-human health in an interdependent world
Panel
Invitation for a panel
Invitation to the ‚More-than-human health in an interdependent world’ panel
Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference
Convenors: Wim Van Daele (UiA), Heidi Fjeld (UiO), Jelle Wouters (RTC), and Elena Neri (UiA)
Durham University (UK) April 23–24, 2025.
Abstract of maximum 250 words via the Abstract Management Portal at latest by 13 January 2025. The website includes guidance on how to select the panel and to submit your abstract. We look forward to receiving your abstracts.
Panel Abstract:
The concepts of One Health, Planetary Health, and Eco-Health foreground the dependency of human health on the health of the environment. In scientific practice, these concepts tend to focus mostly on the scientific biological and tangible social aspects of the interdependencies between the human and non-human aspects of health, neglecting the role played by intangible and invisible other-than-human entities. Hence, we adopt the notion of “more-than-human health” to enhance attentiveness to different ontological and related (micro)biosocial practices of human and other-than-human health and well-being across the world.
This panel invites contributions that explore complex interdependencies and entanglements between human beings and visible/tangible and invisible/intangible other-than human entities that in their entanglement shape more-than-human health. We invite interdisciplinary oriented papers that examine the (micro)biosocial connections between invisible and (scientifically made) visible aspects in the more-than-human interdependent practice of crafting health and wellbeing across different situations and ontologies. We welcome particularly papers that attest to the situated (micro)biosocialities within these ontological practices in more-than-human health. This can include, but is not limited to, papers exploring entanglements between:
-ritual practices and microbiomes
‑Cosmology, climate change, and changing health practices
‑Supernatural entities, animals, and microbiomes
‑Epigenetics, stress and food environments
and more underexplored interdependencies…
Reframing Anthropology for Planetary Health: Engaging new thinking on the matter, processes and dynamics of health-environment relations
Panel
CfP for a panel at Health, Environment and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference at Durham University
CfP for the panel “Reframing Anthropology for Planetary Health: Engaging new thinking on the matter, processes and dynamics of health-environment relations”
Health, Environment and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference at Durham University
23–24 April 2025
The call for abstracts is open until 13 January
Abstract:
As the world becomes hotter and more polluted, the relations between human health and environmental harms reframe anthropological ways of thinking and doing, bringing the domains of medical and environmental anthropology into alignment. From the mounting burdens of difficult-to-notice chemical exposures to the increased risk of extreme weather events, the environmental conditions of health, wellness, and liveability is shifting empirical, conceptual and methodological attentions for anthropology (Brown and Nading 2019; Kirksey 2014; Seeberg et al. 2020) with increasing concern for contaminant flows (Ballestero 2019; Bond 2021; Krause 2017; Liboiron 2021) and their consequences for environmental care and remediation (Green 2024; Papadopoulos et al. 2023). Despite advances, anthropologists remain divided on whether their entry or endpoints are ailing human bodies or ailing ecologies, thus we ask, how can we attend to the kinds of phenomena, activities and processes that pull body-ecology relations into relief? While the matter of bodies (human and other-than-human) still remain at the nexus of changing environments and climates, what gains can we make from turning attention to the actually existing processes which mediate bodies and environments e.g. metabolism, kinetics, thermodynamics and more? What kinds of methodological and conceptual traction do they provide? Anchored in anthropological commitments to non-reductionist noticing of human and other-than-human worlds (Bubandt et al. 2024), this panel invites new thinking, experimentation and exploration of mediating processes as distinct from matter, substance and bodies. Our aim is to explore the current methodological and empirical shifts upon which anthropologists are staging interrogations of health-environment relations.
Panel abstracts must be submitted via the conference management system.
Reframing Anthropology for Planetary Health: Engaging new thinking on the matter, processes and dynamics of health-environment relations
Panel
CfP for a panel at HEAT, Durham, UK
CfP for a panel on “Reframing Anthropology for Planetary Health: Engaging new thinking on the matter, processes and dynamics of health-environment relations”
HEAT
Durham
April 2025
The call for abstracts is open until 13 January
Panel abstracts must be submitted via the conference management system. The call for abstracts is open until 13 January!
Abstract:
As the world becomes hotter and more polluted, the relations between human health and environmental harms reframe anthropological ways of thinking and doing, bringing the domains of medical and environmental anthropology into alignment. From the mounting burdens of difficult-to-notice chemical exposures to the increased risk of extreme weather events, the environmental conditions of health, wellness, and liveability is shifting empirical, conceptual and methodological attentions for anthropology (Brown and Nading 2019; Kirksey 2014; Seeberg et al. 2020) with increasing concern for contaminant flows (Ballestero 2019; Bond 2021; Krause 2017; Liboiron 2021) and their consequences for environmental care and remediation (Green 2024; Papadopoulos et al. 2023). Despite advances, anthropologists remain divided on whether their entry or endpoints are ailing human bodies or ailing ecologies, thus we ask, how can we attend to the kinds of phenomena, activities and processes that pull body-ecology relations into relief? While the matter of bodies (human and other-than-human) still remain at the nexus of changing environments and climates, what gains can we make from turning attention to the actually existing processes which mediate bodies and environments e.g. metabolism, kinetics, thermodynamics and more? What kinds of methodological and conceptual traction do they provide? Anchored in anthropological commitments to non-reductionist noticing of human and other-than-human worlds (Bubandt et al. 2024), this panel invites new thinking, experimentation and exploration of mediating processes as distinct from matter, substance and bodies. Our aim is to explore the current methodological and empirical shifts upon which anthropologists are staging interrogations of health-environment relations.
Bodily Practices Between Individual Well-being and Institutional Regulation
Panel
CfP for a workshop of the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA)
CfP for a workshop on „Bodily Practices Between Individual Well-being and Institutional Regulation“.
Organized by the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA)
The deadline for submission is 15th January 2025.
Please send questions and proposals via: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/dgska2025/p/16045
Short Abstract:
The workshop explores bodily practices at the intersection of individual well-being and institutional regulation. It focuses on questions of knowledge production, embodiment, power structures, and the role of religious, private, or state actors in the construction and commercialization of commons. Using examples such as yoga and other healing-oriented practices like meditation, Tai Chi, Sufi dance, or veganism, the workshop highlights the complex interconnections between individual bodily practices, global health discourses, intellectual property claims, and identity politics. Participants are invited to present ethnographic case studies that examine these dynamics and the performative role of such practices in both local and global contexts.
The panel will be held in German, but English contributions are most welcome
Ethnographies of Expert Knowledges in Mental Health, Neurodivergence, and Disability
Panel
Panel at 10th Ethnography and Qualitative Research conference, the international conference of ERQ, Trento, Italy
CfP for a Panel on „Ethnographies of Expert Knowledges in Mental Health, Neurodivergence, and Disability”
10th Ethnography and Qualitative Research conference, the international conference of ERQ, one of Italy’s most prominent journals in sociology and anthropology
July 10–12, 2025
Trento, Italy
The deadline for submitting abstracts is January 20
33. Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability:
Nowadays, there has been a «discursive expolosion» surrounding mental health, disability, and neurodivergence resulting in a wide array of heterogeneous narratives and representations in public and academic debates. Particularly on digital platforms, we witness a rise in content focused on «positivity» and the reversal of stigma. These can certainly be seen as an incursion into the political sphere by mad/crip activism; however, it is important to recognize how (part of) these discourses could be absorbed into a neoliberal framework. In a context of performative and extractivist logic, mad/crip/neurodivergent positivity risks becoming yet another tool that decrees the «salvation» of those with the resources to fit into the framework of «diversity» valorisation, while leading to processes of «monstrification» towards those who deviate from this construction of subjectivity.
Central in operating this differentiation is the role of expert knowledge. Although mental health, disability, and neurodivergence remain still framed within a predominantly biomedical paradigm, a range of technical figures are intervening in the construction of categories and the «take charge of users». An archipelago of expert knowledges – social workers, legal actors, tutors, educational services, (former) patients who take on roles as «expert users», NGO volunteers – thus intervene in identity and relational constructions, defining life trajectories, producing spaces and services that inherently navigate the constitutive ambiguity between care and control, treatment and neglect. Among these are the social sciences, both in their production of knowledge and in providing tools for social care practices. They contribute to defining, identifying, classifying, and quantifying the users, positioning them within the grids of «deserving/appropriate» vs «irrecoverable» patient, «rehabilitable» vs excluded.
The current configuration, resulting from the dismantling of national social protection systems in the wake of austerity policies and the shift of responsibility to the private sector, represents only the latest phase in a long-standing process of differential inclusion and exclusion, deeply embedded in the very structure of social welfare and the State itself.
Ethnographic practice highlights power structures, fostering critical reflection on the role of social work and expert knowledges. This approach challenges established institutions and models while also situating the processes surrounding care and treatment within relationships, contexts, and everyday tactics.
We invite contributions that address mental health, disability, and neurodivergence, within and beyond the care/control binary. We ask what is the role of «expert knowledges» – considered in their singularity or intersections – in the construction of subjectivities, in the production of vulnerability, and in the processes of distinction and fragmentation of the user base; and how practices of subtraction or resistance to such devices configure.
Open questions
What processes shape the construction of meaning around the categories of vulnerability and fragility (across disability, neurodivergence, and mental health), and how do these categories influence social work in taking charge and managing users?
How can an ethnographic critique of concepts such as paternalism and pietism in social welfare be framed, starting from practices of care, control, neglect, and treatment?
How do practices of distinction within social services (broadly defined) emerge between the «deserving» user and the «problematic» user, and how do these distinctions—simultaneously practical, organizational, and moral—affect the balance between care and control?
How does the relationship between families, public services, and caregivers configure the everyday dynamics of care and control within a context of poly-crisis and dismantling the welfare state? How do the «third sector», humanitarian organizations, and volunteering intersect in this relationship?
How do mad/crip/neurodivergent subjectivation processes unfold, both within and beyond medicalization and the framing of service users?
What impact do social inequalities—based on structural axes of class, race, gender, sexualities, and others—have on the rationale of social services? How do these processes influence street-level bureaucracy practices, and how do they shape subjectivation within these systems?
What forms of withdrawal and detachment from the controlling dimensions of social and clinical work exist, and what possibilities do they open up?
What are the processes of spatialization of disability/neurodivergence/mental health, and how do they relate to social and clinical work? What are the geographies of these processes, and what do they add to our understanding?
At the link, you’ll find all the information needed for the application: https://erq-conference.soc.unitn.it/call-for-contributions/
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out: fabio.bertoni@ics.ulisboa.pt and/or luca.sterchele@unito.it
Composing Coexistence: Challenges in Research on More-than-Human Health
Workshop
In person workshop at Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg
Doctoral workshop „Composing Coexistence: Challenges in Research on More-than-Human Health”
20–21 Feb 2025
Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg
Organized by the research group Medical Anthropology at the BNITM
Environmental disasters and the (re-)emergence of infectious diseases require human health to be considered in relation to the health of animals and the environment. A growing number of social scientists investigate multispecies contact zones and how these are bound up with anthropogenic processes, such as climate change, land use, resource exploitation, pollution and toxicity. Their studies have had an enormous impact on the development of biosocial approaches to multispecies relations.
Anthropological ambitions to compose coexistence in a sensitive way are higher than ever. However, multispecies researchers face several challenges and barriers, for example with regard to inter- or transdisciplinary work. While emphasizing the interconnectedness of humans, animals and the environment, concepts like ‘One Health’ or ‘Planetary Health’ ultimately revolve around questions of human health and well-being. As a result, anthropocentric and human exceptionalist approaches are often promoted, neglecting the perspectives and needs of non-human beings. How can social scientists debunk such approaches? How can we ensure that we do not reproduce these perspectives? How can we address issues of translation, advocacy and agency concerning non-human beings?
With this workshop, we seek to address doctoral researchers from the social sciences and humanities with a keen interest in the study of more-than-human health. Over two days, we will present and discuss our research projects, and engage in creative exercises considering current debates on multispecies methodologies and related obstacles. Furthermore, we are delighted that Giorgio Brocco (University of Vienna) will give a talk on chemicality and toxicity in the plantation world of the French Caribbean.
We warmly welcome applications from doctoral students who are at an early stage of their research or in the post-fieldwork phase. As early-career researchers, our aim is to create a supportive environment where we can strengthen our research topics and connect with researchers who share an interest in exploring the entanglements between human, animal and environmental health.
The workshop will be held in English. If you would like to participate, please send a description of your research project (max. 750 words) and your academic CV to vivien.barth(at)bnitm.de or to erik.zillmann(at)bnitm.de by 30 September 2024.
Health Activism: Instigating Change in Systems of Care
Workshop
Call For Papers for a Workshop at University of Amsterdam (UvA)
Call For Papers
Health Activism: Instigating Change in Systems of Care
Hosted by Dr. Natashe Lemos Dekker and Dr. Maria Hagan
Centre for Social Science in Global Health, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam (UvA)
Thursday 20th & Friday 21st of February 2025
Cracks and gaps in our health care systems have been increasingly exposed in recent years, both in terms of these systems’ capacity and in terms of restrictions regarding whom they cater to and how. These frailties have been emphasised in moments of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but also emerge out of shifting political landscapes which seek to restrict the rights of women, asylum seekers and people with a disability, among many others. Against this socio-political backdrop, revived and newly emerging forms of health activism can be distinguished. In many countries around the world, health care professionals, informal caregivers, and those in need of care are actively participating in movements and collective actions, to address injustices and exclusion, and to fill the gaps in existing health care systems.
This workshop seeks to spark conversation around acts of care and social protest, paying close attention to how professional and informal caregivers (ranging from doctors and nurses to patients, families and solidarity actors) engage in forms of activism and galvanise movements to address health concerns and stimulate change in (public) health systems. We are interested in how health activism movements come into being in different global contexts, and how they impact (strengthen or interfere with) vernacular modes of coping with illness, disability, injury and loss. Together, we will interrogate how health activism impacts national health policies and systems, and how such initiatives travel beyond geographical boundaries.
As part of the event, medical and environmental anthropologist Dr. Alex Nading will join us as a keynote speaker. He will give a public lecture on Thursday the 20th of February between 15:00 and 17.00. Dr. Nading is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press 2014) and of The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua, which will be published with Duke University Press in 2025. keynote speaker. He will give a public lecture on Thursday the 20th of February between 15:00 and 17.00. Dr. Nading is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press 2014) and of The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua, which will be published with Duke University Press in 2025.
By bringing examples of health activism initiatives from different contexts into conversation, we aim to shed light on the different ways in which these movements are sparked, how they operate and instigate change. The multi-sited thinking developed throughout the workshop will form the basis for a concrete discussion on how collaborative knowledge-building might stimulate practice.
Papers may include, but are not limited to, the following topics (all regional focuses are welcome):
– Grassroots initiatives providing (health)care to under-resourced areas and underserved communities
– Contemporary or historical studies of social movements around issues of health inequality and disability
– Intersections of health, (in)justice, and the emergence of social movements
– Practices of “patient”-led advocacy and activism
– Practices of care and advocacy by professional care providers within spaces of care (hospitals, clinics, health centres, homes, safehouses…)
We will ask participants to circulate short papers before the workshop, so we can familiarise ourselves with each other’s work ahead of time. The workshop will be organised in thematic sessions determined according to the papers we receive, and each participant will shortly present their work (15–20 minutes) followed by comments and discussion. In sum, the workshop will map diverse forms of health activism by bringing together a selection of localized accounts. Honing in on the political layeredness of global health policies and practices, it will shed light on the potential value for global health programmes to engage with local-level initiatives. These conversations will also form the basis for an online publication.
If you are interested in taking part in the workshop, please send an abstract (max. 200 words) of the paper you would like to contribute to the workshop. Please send this to Maria Hagan (m.h.hagan@uva.nl) and Natashe Lemos Dekker (n.lemosdekker@uva.nl) by Monday the 25th of November 2024. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by Monday the 2nd of December 2024.
Lunch will be provided on both days of the workshop. Travel and accommodation costs, however, unfortunately cannot be covered.
This event is supported by a 2024 Social Science in Global Health (SSGH) small grant.
Health Activism: Instigating Change in Systems of Care
Workshop
CfP for a Workshop at Centre for Social Science in Global Health, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam
CfP Workshop on „Health Activism: Instigating Change in Systems of Care”
20th & 21st of February 2025
Centre for Social Science in Global Health, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam (UvA)
Hosted by Dr. Natashe Lemos Dekker and Dr. Maria Hagan
Details:
Cracks and gaps in our health care systems have been increasingly exposed in recent years, both in terms of these systems’ capacity and in terms of restrictions regarding whom they cater to and how. These frailties have been emphasised in moments of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but also emerge out of shifting political landscapes which seek to restrict the rights of women, asylum seekers and people with a disability, among many others. Against this socio-political backdrop, revived and newly emerging forms of health activism can be distinguished. In many countries around the world, health care professionals, informal caregivers, and those in need of care are actively participating in movements and collective actions, to address injustices and exclusion, and to fill the gaps in existing health care systems.
This workshop seeks to spark conversation around acts of care and social protest, paying close attention to how professional and informal caregivers (ranging from doctors and nurses to patients, families and solidarity actors) engage in forms of activism and galvanise movements to address health concerns and stimulate change in (public) health systems. We are interested in how health activism movements come into being in different global contexts, and how they impact (strengthen or interfere with) vernacular modes of coping with illness, disability, injury and loss. Together, we will interrogate how health activism impacts national health policies and systems, and how such initiatives travel beyond geographical boundaries.
As part of the event, medical and environmental anthropologist Dr. Alex Nading will join us as a keynote speaker. He will give a public lecture on Thursday the 20th of February between 15:00 and 17.00. Dr. Nading is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (University of California Press 2014) and of The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua, which will be published with Duke University Press in 2025.
By bringing examples of health activism initiatives from different contexts into conversation, we aim to shed light on the different ways in which these movements are sparked, how they operate and instigate change. The multi-sited thinking developed throughout the workshop will form the basis for a concrete discussion on how collaborative knowledge-building might stimulate practice.
Papers may include, but are not limited to, the following topics (all regional focuses are welcome):
· Grassroots initiatives providing (health)care to under-resourced areas and underserved communities
· Contemporary or historical studies of social movements around issues of health inequality and disability
· Intersections of health, (in)justice, and the emergence of social movements
· Practices of “patient”-led advocacy and activism
· Practices of care and advocacy by professional care providers within spaces of care (hospitals, clinics, health centres, homes, safehouses…)
We will ask participants to circulate short papers before the workshop, so we can familiarise ourselves with each other’s work ahead of time. The workshop will be organised in thematic sessions determined according to the papers we receive, and each participant will shortly present their work (15–20 minutes) followed by comments and discussion. In sum, the workshop will map diverse forms of health activism by bringing together a selection of localized accounts. Honing in on the political layeredness of global health policies and practices, it will shed light on the potential value for global health programmes to engage with local-level initiatives. These conversations will also form the basis for an online publication.
If you are interested in taking part in the workshop, please send an abstract (max. 200 words) of the paper you would like to contribute to the workshop. Please send this to Maria Hagan (m.h.hagan@uva.nl) and Natashe Lemos Dekker (n.lemosdekker@uva.nl) by Monday the 25th of November 2024. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by Monday the 2nd of December 2024.
Lunch will be provided on both days of the workshop. Travel and accommodation costs, however, unfortunately cannot be covered.
This event is supported by a 2024 Social Science in Global Health (SSGH) small grant.
Medical Critique in Hashtags? Chronic Health Conditions on Social Media
Panel
Panel organized by the STS-Hub, Belrin
Call for papers in the „Medical Critique in Hashtags? Chronic Health Conditions on Social Media” at the STS-Hub
Berlin
11–14.03.2025
Deadline: 31.10.2024
The aim of the panel to discuss the role of social media as a platform for generating awareness and forming interest groups around medical critique. In particular, the panel wants to explore chronic health conditions that receive inadequate attention within the established (bio)medical system, such as ADHD and autism in women, endometriosis, ME/CFS, and/or Long COVID.
More details
Health-related panels at the SfAA Conference March 25–29, 2025
Panel
Conference in Portland, US
Revitalizing Applied Anthropology
85th Annual Meeting
March 25–29, 2025
Hilton Portland Downtown Portland, OR
The SfAA Annual Meeting provides an invaluable opportunity for scholars, practicing social scientists, and students from a variety of disciplines and organizations to discuss their work and brainstorm for the future. It is more than just a conference: it’s a rich place to trade ideas, methods, and practical solutions, as well as enter the lifeworld of other professionals. SfAA members come from a variety of disciplines — anthropology, sociology, economics, business, planning, medicine, nursing, law, and other related social/behavioral sciences. Make 2025 the year you’ll spend a few days presenting, learning, and networking in Portland, OR, with the SfAA.
More info
10th Integrated History and Philosophy of Science conference
Konferenz
Conference at California Institute of Technology
10th Integrated History and Philosophy of Science conference
27–29 March 2025
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
The Committee for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science invites the submission of abstracts for individual papers and “lightning talks” for &HPS10, the 10th conference in the series Integrated History and Philosophy of Science. We seek contributions that genuinely integrate historical and philosophical analyses of science (i.e., the physical sciences, life sciences, cognitive sciences, and social sciences) or that discuss methodological issues surrounding the prospects and challenges of integrating history and philosophy of science. For information about the Committee for Integrated History and Philosophy of Science and previous conferences, see http://integratedhps.org/.
Keynote speakers: Lydia Patton (Virginia Tech), Marius Stan (Boston College)
Please note that &HPS10 does not run parallel sessions and, given the number of slots available, does not accept symposium submissions. In addition to contributed papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes of questions), &HPS10 will also feature a combination of 10-minute lightning talks followed by a communal session with ‘discussion stations’ for the lightning talk presenters. For this forum, we welcome submissions that are more exploratory, works in progress, try out new ideas, and so on. Each presenter may appear on the final program only once.
All proposals (whether for a contributed paper or lightning talk) should contain a title and an abstract of up to 700 words (including references).
Please submit your abstracts to https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/75646/submitter
We have an ongoing commitment to fostering diversity and equality in our programs. Submissions from members of underrepresented groups are particularly welcome!
Deadline for abstract submissions: 11:59 pm Anywhere on Earth (UTC ‑12) 18 August. Notification date: 31 October, 2024.
Please direct any inquiries to Uljana Feest (feest@philos.uni-hannover.de) or Dana Tulodziecki (dtulodzi@purdue.edu)
Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices
Workshop
Call for Papers for the 10th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology, Universitry of Lübeck
Call for Papers for the 10th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology: „Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices”
27–29 March 2025
IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck
Organized by:
EpistHist Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology
https://episthist.hypotheses.org/
Opening lecture:
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Ten years ago, the Research Network on the History and Methods of Historical Epistemology, EpistHist, began in Paris with its inaugural workshop on épistémologie historique. These workshops have turned into an annual opportunity to discuss key issues in the history and philosophy of sciences and engage in contemporary methodological debates. By mobilizing historical epistemology as a broad approach, the workshops mediate between 20th-century French epistemology and its recent renewal in the English-speaking world. The abstracts and programs of past editions are available on the research network’s website: https://episthist.hypotheses.org/.
After editions in Paris, Dijon, and Venice, EpistHist is now crossing the Rhine and the Elbe rivers to celebrate its first decade at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Studies, University of Lübeck, where Hans-Jörg Rheinberger once conceived tools for interlacing the history of science with philosophy through historical epistemology.
This anniversary workshop will focus on the topic of Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices. Here, we aim to explore which approaches within historical epistemology are most suitable for investigating the production of knowledge and practices related to the psyche.
Since Gaston Bachelard (1984) placed research instruments and techniques at the core of his epistemological history with the concept of phenomenotechnique, the role of practices has become central to understanding the production and transmission of scientific knowledge. Compared to microscopes or particle accelerators, psychology and the psy-sciences might seem to lack equivalent phenomenotechniques. However, at a closer look, the psy-sciences make widespread use of questionnaires, interviews, protocols, and other “paper tools” essential for their knowledge practices. Mitchell Ash and Thomas Sturm (2007), following Ian Hacking (1992) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2017), have especially pointed to the role of instruments of experimentation as organizers of psychological research practices.
On a cultural and political level, following Michel Foucault’s (2008) analysis of psy-practices as disciplinary practices, scholars like Ian Hacking (1995, 1998, 2002), Arnold I. Davidson (2002), and others explored the normative effects of psy-sciences and psy-practices on subjects, subjectivity, and conceptions of selfhood, showing how concepts and categories shape experiences, resulting in new ways of “making up people.”
Nonetheless, with the notable exception of some recent works (Marks, 2017; Rosner, 2018), inquiries into the history of psy-sciences have primarily focused on the production of psy-knowledge, often overlooking psychotherapeutic practices under the assumption that these are merely applications of that knowledge. Our workshop intends to challenge this by explicitly addressing psychotherapeutic practices as equally relevant for a historical epistemology of psy-sciences. We follow Georges Canguilhem’s (1974) insight that medicine is not the mere application of knowledge generated in the life sciences but a set of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques situated at the crossroads of different disciplines and sciences. Borrowing from Canguilhem, the aim of our workshop is precisely to explore such intersections and crossroads, from experimental psychology to spiritual exercises, and from psychiatric classification systems to psychotherapeutic approaches.
We welcome proposals exploring the relationship between scientific inquiries producing knowledge and the technical development of psychotherapeutic practices. Key questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to:
– What approach within historical epistemology helps to better understand the social, political, and normative effects of psy-practices?
– What instruments in the psy-field can be conceptualized as “paper tools” or even phenomenotechniques?
– To what extent and how do categories and concepts from psychotherapy help create new “kinds of people”?
– How has the relationship between psychological research and psychotherapeutic approaches changed over time?
– How have specific scientific inquiries shaped different psychotherapeutic practices?
– Did the scientific knowledge produced by the psy-sciences migrate into psychotherapy, and, if so, how was it translated, transformed, and adapted in the process?
– In what ways have psychotherapeutic techniques contributed to psychological research?
– How have different scientific findings been used to legitimize psychotherapeutic practices?
– What roles have cultural, institutional, and political contexts played in shaping psy-sciences, psychotherapeutic practices, and their interrelations?
Proposals (500 words, along with a brief bio of the candidate) must be submitted by November 30, 2024, in .doc format to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent by early January 2025. The workshop will be conducted in English.
Organizing committee:
Caroline Angleraux (iBrain U1253, INSERM de Tours)
Lucie Fabry (LIR3S, Université de Bourgogne)
Lisa Malich (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Iván Moya-Diez (IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck)
Perceval Pillon (IHPST, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS)
Matteo Vagelli (CFS, Università di Pisa)
This workshop is funded by:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project Number 516932573: “The cognitive revolution in therapeutic practice: adapting scientific ideals and forming subjects in Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy, 1950–1990.”
With the support of:
IMGWF, Universität zu Lübeck.
IHPST (UMR 8590), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS.
LIR3S (UMR7366), Université de Bourgogne/CNRS.
Gefühle und Sinne in der Geschichte der Medizin
Konferenz
42. Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin des Bosch Health Campus
Das 42. Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin des Bosch Health Campus befasst sich mit Gefühlen und Sinnen in der Geschichte der Medizin. Nachwuchswissenschaftler:innen haben die Möglichkeit, Potentiale in diesen Forschungsfeldern in verschiedenen Epochen und Regionen auszuloten und ihre eigenen Projekte zu präsentieren.
42. Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar
Gefühle und Sinne sind keine ahistorischen Konstanten, sondern kulturell und historisch wandelbar. Forschungsarbeiten aus der Sinnes- und der Emotionsgeschichte haben es eindrücklich gezeigt: Gefühle und Sinne haben und machen Geschichte.
Angst, Liebe, Ekel oder Trauer sind an den jeweiligen historischen Kontext rückgebunden, bringen ihn zugleich aber auch hervor. Gefühle existieren in einem Spannungsfeld zwischen individueller körperlicher Erfahrung und gesellschaftlicher Konstruktion. So grenzten sich alternativmedizinische Akteursgruppen auf dem medizinischen Markt durch emotionale Zuschreibungen wie ärztliche „Operationswut“ und „wissenschaftliche Kälte“ von der „schulmedizinischen“ Praxis ab. Aus patientengeschichtlicher Perspektive sind Gefühle und Emotionen überaus wichtig, nicht zuletzt, wenn sie von den gesellschaftlichen Normvorstellungen abwichen und pathologisiert wurden. Auch der Wandel medizinischer Behandlungsmethoden hatte Auswirkungen auf die Emotionen von Patient:innen. So verschob bspw. die Einführung und Verbreitung von Narkotika die Ängste der Behandelten von den Schmerzen zu einem Kontrollverlust.
Gerade in der Vormoderne spielte die sensorische Wahrnehmung bei der Beurteilung von Gesundheit und Krankheit eine entscheidende Rolle. Der Gesundheitszustand von Patient:innen konnte durch bloßes Ansehen des Urins während der Harnschau beurteilt werden. Ansteckende Krankheiten sowie das todbringende Miasma konnten hingegen gerochen werden. Doch auch in der Moderne blieben Sinne in der Medizin zentral, beispielsweise das Ertasten von schmerzenden Körperregionen für die Selbstdiagnose oder das Hören mit Hilfe eines Stethoskops für die Diagnose durch medizinisches Fachpersonal.
Über diese inhaltlichen Thematiken hinaus lässt sich aber auch grundsätzlich über die Chancen und Herausforderungen eines emotions- oder sinneshistorischen Ansatzes für die medizingeschichtliche Forschung nachdenken. Wie lassen sich die beiden eigenständigen und in den letzten Jahren höchst dynamischen Forschungsfelder in einen Dialog bringen? Auf welche begrifflichen Konzepte und welche Quellen lässt sich zurückgreifen, um die Rolle von Sinnen und Gefühlen in der Medizingeschichte zu untersuchen?
Für das 42. Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar 2025 sollen diese Problematiken mit unterschiedlichen Ansätzen und Methoden für verschiedene Epochen und Regionen beleuchtet werden.
Als Vorschlag und Anregung sind folgende Themengebiete denkbar:
Patient:innengefühle: Welche Gefühle brachten Patient:innen im Laufe der Geschichte mit der medizinischen Behandlung in Verbindung? Welchen Einfluss hatte dies auf das Verhältnis von Ärzt:innen, anderen Gesundheitsberufen und Patient:innen? Lässt sich etwa von verschiedenen „emotional communities“ (Rosenwein) sprechen?
Geschlecht, Sinn und Gefühl: Inwiefern lassen sich geschlechtsspezifische Normen, Zuschreibungen und Deutungen in Bezug auf Sinne und Gefühle in der Medizingeschichte feststellen?
Sensorik in der Medizin: Welche Sinneswahrnehmungen spielten und spielen bei der Beurteilung von Krankheit und Gesundheit eine Rolle? Lassen sich epochenübergreifende Konstanten und zentrale Zäsuren ausmachen? Welche Perspektiven eröffnet die Sinnesgeschichte nicht zuletzt für eine Geschichte der Medizin, die über den Menschen hinausdenkt?
Gefühle und Sinne in der Wissensproduktion: Welche Rolle spielten menschliche (und tierliche) Gefühle und Sinne für die Produktion von medizinischem Wissen? Inwiefern beeinflussen Emotionen auch die Arbeit von Medizinhistoriker: innen?
Pathologisierung von Gefühlen und Sinnen: Gefühlsregungen, die im jeweiligen Zeitkontext von der „Normalität“ abwichen, wurden oftmals als Krankheiten gedeutet. Dabei war der Übergang von „gesund“ zu „krank“ fließend und hing von ganz unterschiedlichen Faktoren ab. Welche waren das? Lassen sich für bestimmte Epochen spezifische „Gefühlsregime“ (Reddy) ausmachen?
Andere, dem Thema im weitesten Sinne verwandte Fragestellungen und Projekte sind ebenfalls willkommen.
Das Stuttgarter Fortbildungsseminar des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin des Bosch Health Campus unterscheidet sich von klassischen Fachtagungen. Es ist ein interdisziplinäres Forum für Nachwuchswissenschaftler:innen, dessen zentrale Anliegen der Austausch und die inhaltliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema der Tagung vornehmlich in historischer Perspektive sind. Der Fokus liegt daher auf innovativen methodischen Herangehensweisen, neuen Fragestellungen und Ideen und weniger auf perfekt ausgearbeiteten Präsentationen. So dient die Tagung auch der Vernetzung von Forschenden in einem frühen Stadium ihrer Karriere.
Vor Beginn der Tagung werden die Abstracts zu den einzelnen Vorträgen an alle Teilnehmenden versandt, um eine bessere Vorbereitung zu ermöglichen. Erwünscht ist die Anwesenheit während der gesamten Tagung, um inhaltliche Bezüge zwischen den Beiträgen zu ermöglichen.
Das Seminar findet vom 07.04. bis 09.04.2025 in Stuttgart statt.
Ablauf
Die Auswahl der Beiträge, die Gestaltung des endgültigen Programms und die Moderation der Sektionen liegen in den Händen einer Vorbereitungsgruppe (Sara Müller, Teresa Schenk, Dirk Modler, Pierre Pfütsch). Die Auswahl der Teilnehmenden wird durch die Vorbereitungsgruppe anhand anonymisierter Vorschläge vorgenommen.
Für jeden Beitrag sind 45 Minuten eingeplant, wobei max. 20 Minuten für den Vortrag zur Verfügung stehen und 25 Minuten für die Diskussion. Bei Arbeitsgruppen (vorzugsweise zwei Personen) erhöht sich das Zeitbudget für den Vortrag und die anschließende Diskussion auf eine Stunde. Die Tagungssprache ist Deutsch, einzelne Vorträge können allerdings auch auf Englisch gehalten werden. Die Teilnahme wird vom Institut für Geschichte der Medizin des Bosch Health Campus finanziert. Dies schließt die Übernachtungen, gemeinsame Mahlzeiten und Bahnreisen 2. Klasse (in Ausnahmefällen günstige Flüge) ein. Kosten für eine Anreise per PKW werden nicht erstattet.
Anmeldung
Ein Exposé von max. einer Seite, aus dem Titel, Fragestellung, Methoden, verwendete Quellen und mögliche Thesen/Ergebnisse hervorgehen, sowie eine Kurzvita, senden Sie bitte bis zum 12. Januar 2025 per E‑Mail (gerne als Word-Datei) an Dr. Pierre Pfütsch pierre.pfuetsch@igm-bosch.de.
Between Disparities and Neglect: Anthropological Approaches to minority health and Wellbeing
AGEM-Veranstaltung
Panel in the frameworks of ASA 2025 conference „Critical Junctions: Anthropology on the Move”
Call for papers for the ASA 2025 conference „Critical Junctions: Anthropology on the Move”
8th-11th of April 2025 in Birmingham, England.
Panel titled „Between Disparities and Neglect: Anthropological Approaches to minority health and Wellbeing”
Deadline for Panel propositions is 23:59 GMT on 18th November 2024.
Panel description
This panel aims to explore the complex intersections of health, wellbeing, and marginalisation, focusing on how anthropology, including critical medical anthropology theories and methodologies, can examine the lived experiences of minority communities facing health disparities worldwide. Contributions will critically examine both the challenges and opportunities inherent in conducting research with marginalised groups, particularly in contexts where systemic neglect, discrimination and sociocultural factors contribute to significant inequities in health outcomes. Through ethnographic studies, community-engaged research, and critical analysis, the discussion will address diverse topics, including access to healthcare, mental wellbeing, the impact of historical trauma, and the role of alternative care practices in promoting resilience, among others. The panel is also interested in addressing the ethical implications of academic research with vulnerable populations, engaging in a critical dialogue on how to ensure that research practices do not perpetuate harm and inequalities but instead contribute to social justice and empowerment. By centring the debate on minority voices and perspectives, this panel aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how anthropology can help address and mitigate health disparities, highlighting both the potential for positive change and the responsibilities that come with such work.
More information on the Panel (Code: P07) and the full programme for the event can be found here
Call for Papers here
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via the webpage platform or email.
Muriel Lamarque: M.Lamarque@shu.ac.uk
Sadiq Bhanbhro : S.Bhanbhro@shu.ac.uk
Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care pathways in superdiverse environments.
Panel
Panel at ASA UK conference in Birmingham
CfP for a Panel on „Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care pathways in superdiverse environments”
ASA UK conference in Birmingham
8–11th April 2025
Short Abstract:
This panel explores ethnographically how ethics shapes health-seeking behaviours and how health services may design care pathways that accommodate diverse moral worldviews. Ethical frameworks and lived experience ‑especially in situations of precarity- shape how people navigate health services.
Long Abstract
Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care-pathways in superdiverse environments.
To provide adequate services, health providers and civil society organisations need for their care pathways to be adapted to the reality of health-seeking practices. In turn, in superdiverse environments, advice and health-seeking differs between social groups (according to gender, income, race and ethnicity, migration status and so on). In circumstances of extreme precarity – cost of living crisis, in-poverty employment, racism and discrimination, etc.- uncertainty and lived experience play a major role (MacGregor et al 2020).
People do not behave in a predicted linear fashion solely according to their socio-demographic characteristics, but rather experience precarious life and deal with emergent and unexpected challenges and priorities of an uncertain environment (Al-Mohammad and Peluso 2012). In turn people practice moral navigation, adapting and reassessing their values, priorities and health decisions as their therapeutic itinerary unfolds, rather than following fixed pathways (White and Jha 2021).
People’s ethical frameworks – how they behave as ethical agents, morally bound to others (their peers, their families, etc.)- shape how people seek health advice and their decisions when engaging with health providers and public services (Ripoll et al 2022).
This panel is seeking ethnographic papers that contribute to the following questions:
– How do people’s moral and ethical demands shape their health-seeking practices?
– Do people face moral conundrums when deciding to make particular decisions in health care or in and how do they
– What role does uncertainty and emergence play in this moral navigation of health services?
– How do health service providers take into account people’s moral lives when assessing people’s navigation of health services?
– Can care pathways be adapted to the different moral worldviews of the people they wish to support through the health system?
This panel will aim to bring together ethnographic insights from the field of anthropology of ethics with applied anthropology in the context of health.
References:
Al-Mohammad, H., & Peluso, D. (2012). Ethics and the “rough ground” of the everyday: the overlappings of life in postinvasion Iraq. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2), 42–58.
MacGregor, H., Ripoll, S., & Leach, M. (2020). Disease outbreaks: navigating uncertainties in preparedness and response. Taylor and Francis.
Ripoll, S., Ouvrier, A., Hrynick, T., & Schmidt-Sane, M. (2022). Vaccine Equity in Multicultural Urban Settings. A comparative analysis of local government and community action, contextualised political economies, and moral frameworks in Marseille and London
White, S. C., & Jha, S. (2021). Moral navigation and child fostering in Chiawa, Zambia. Africa, 91(2), 249–269.
Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care-pathways in superdiverse environments
Panel
Panel at ASA UK conference in Birmingham
Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care-pathways in superdiverse environments
Panel for the ASA UK conference in Birmingham
8–11th April 2025
We’re aiming to bring together ethnographic insights from the field of anthropology of ethics with applied anthropology in the context of health.
Short Abstract
This panel explores ethnographically how ethics shapes health-seeking behaviours and how health services may design care pathways that accommodate diverse moral worldviews. Ethical frameworks and lived experience ‑especially in situations of precarity- shape how people navigate health services.
Long Abstract
Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care-pathways in superdiverse environments.
To provide adequate services, health providers and civil society organisations need for their care pathways to be adapted to the reality of health-seeking practices. In turn, in superdiverse environments, advice and health-seeking differs between social groups (according to gender, income, race and ethnicity, migration status and so on). In circumstances of extreme precarity – cost of living crisis, in-poverty employment, racism and discrimination, etc.- uncertainty and lived experience play a major role (MacGregor et al 2020).
People do not behave in a predicted linear fashion solely according to their socio-demographic characteristics, but rather experience precarious life and deal with emergent and unexpected challenges and priorities of an uncertain environment (Al-Mohammad and Peluso 2012). In turn people practice moral navigation, adapting and reassessing their values, priorities and health decisions as their therapeutic itinerary unfolds, rather than following fixed pathways (White and Jha 2021).
People’s ethical frameworks – how they behave as ethical agents, morally bound to others (their peers, their families, etc.)- shape how people seek health advice and their decisions when engaging with health providers and public services (Ripoll et al 2022).
This panel is seeking ethnographic papers that contribute to the following questions:
- How do people’s moral and ethical demands shape their health-seeking practices?
- Do people face moral conundrums when deciding to make particular decisions in health care or in and how do they
- What role does uncertainty and emergence play in this moral navigation of health services?
- How do health service providers take into account people’s moral lives when assessing people’s navigation of health services?
- Can care pathways be adapted to the different moral worldviews of the people they wish to support through the health system?
This panel will aim to bring together ethnographic insights from the field of anthropology of ethics with applied anthropology in the context of health.
To propose a paper, please do so through the ASA website. https://theasa.org/conferences/asa2025/programme#15931
References
Al-Mohammad, H., & Peluso, D. (2012). Ethics and the “rough ground” of the everyday: the overlappings of life in postinvasion Iraq. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2), 42–58.
MacGregor, H., Ripoll, S., & Leach, M. (2020). Disease outbreaks: navigating uncertainties in preparedness and response. Taylor and Francis.
Ripoll, S., Ouvrier, A., Hrynick, T., & Schmidt-Sane, M. (2022). Vaccine Equity in Multicultural Urban Settings. A comparative analysis of local government and community action, contextualised political economies, and moral frameworks in Marseille and London
White, S. C., & Jha, S. (2021). Moral navigation and child fostering in Chiawa, Zambia. Africa, 91(2), 249–269.
Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care-pathways in superdiverse environments
Panel
Medanth panel at ASA UK
„Ethical frameworks, health-seeking and care-pathways in superdiverse environments”
8–11.04.2025
Birmingham, UK
More Info: https://theasa.org/conferences/asa2025/programme#15931
Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy
Panel
Panel at the upcoming ASA 2025 conference
„Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy”
Panel at the upcoming ASA 2025 conference taking place in
8–11 April
Birmingham
Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy will be a panel examining the entangling of social and biological reproduction in medical research, practice, and policy, broadly conceived (pun intended). We invite anthropological works which consider these relations today, especially via the social reproduction of kinship, parenthood, or technologies of relatedness. The long abstract with more information is provided below.
The deadline for abstracts is November 18th. Abstracts may be submitted by following this link.
Convenors:
Taylor Riley (University College London)
Olga Doletskaya (University College London)
Long abstract:
Biological and social reproduction are deeply entangled (Rapp and Ginsburg 1991) and reproduction is always a concept on the move. ‘Social reproduction’ has been taken up widely in feminist research as both the undervalued labour that sustains human life and the labour that reproduces social systems and relations. What reproduction and kinship are biologically is co-reproduced with their legal, economic, and cultural meanings. As assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) become, though unevenly, more ordinary (Franklin 2013), entwined concepts of social and biological reproduction continue to travel.
In their close attention to human experiences and relations, anthropological approaches, such as bioethnography (Roberts and Sanz 2017), are well-suited to trace these travels today. Population studies such as birth cohorts are invested in the business of biological reproduction alongside the social reproduction of participation that keeps studies alive. The proliferation of ARTs like in vitro gametogenesis will necessitate socially reproduced changes to concepts of relatedness. Reproductive justice is implicated in the above and other examples—how do these social reproductions deny or grant access to personhood or care, especially for those who are marginalized? Can kinship be post-genomic in these contexts, or only elsewhere?
We invite works using ethnographic methods to discuss biological and social reproduction with reference to biomedical discourses and/or institutions, health policies, population research, and/or the worlds of science and medicine, broadly defined. Papers could e.g. focus on:
- Studies of conception/birth, maternal/infant health, families, and/or parenting
- Genetic or epigenetic research and/or policies
- Reproductive health research and/or policies
- ARTs
- Medicalized fertility and/or infertility
Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy
Panel
CfP for a Panel at the upcoming ASA 2025 conference, Birmingham
Panel on „Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy”
ASA 2025 conference taking place in
8–11 April
Birmingham
Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy will be a panel examining the entangling of social and biological reproduction in medical research, practice, and policy, broadly conceived (pun intended). We invite anthropological works which consider these relations today, especially via the social reproduction of kinship, parenthood, or technologies of relatedness. The long abstract with more information is provided below.
The deadline for abstracts is November 18th. Abstracts may be submitted by following this link: https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/asa2025/panel/15950
Panel Title:
Social and biological reproduction: Entangled concepts on the move in medical research, practice, and policy
Convenors:
Taylor Riley (University College London)
Olga Doletskaya (University College London)
Long abstract:
Biological and social reproduction are deeply entangled (Rapp and Ginsburg 1991) and reproduction is always a concept on the move. ‘Social reproduction’ has been taken up widely in feminist research as both the undervalued labour that sustains human life and the labour that reproduces social systems and relations. What reproduction and kinship are biologically is co-reproduced with their legal, economic, and cultural meanings. As assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) become, though unevenly, more ordinary (Franklin 2013), entwined concepts of social and biological reproduction continue to travel.
In their close attention to human experiences and relations, anthropological approaches, such as bioethnography (Roberts and Sanz 2017), are well-suited to trace these travels today. Population studies such as birth cohorts are invested in the business of biological reproduction alongside the social reproduction of participation that keeps studies alive. The proliferation of ARTs like in vitro gametogenesis will necessitate socially reproduced changes to concepts of relatedness. Reproductive justice is implicated in the above and other examples—how do these social reproductions deny or grant access to personhood or care, especially for those who are marginalized? Can kinship be post-genomic in these contexts, or only elsewhere?
We invite works using ethnographic methods to discuss biological and social reproduction with reference to biomedical discourses and/or institutions, health policies, population research, and/or the worlds of science and medicine, broadly defined. Papers could e.g. focus on:
- Studies of conception/birth, maternal/infant health, families, and/or parenting
– Genetic or epigenetic research and/or policies
– Reproductive health research and/or policies
– ARTs
– Medicalized fertility and/or infertility
Climate change, island change, and wellbeing in small island communities
Panel
CfP for a panel in the international Conference Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT)
Call for paper to the panel on the topic „Climate change, island change, and wellbeing in small island communities”
Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT)
Durham
23 – 24 April 2025
co-organised by Durham and Edinburgh Universities and sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Society (RAI)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Panel: “Climate change, island change, and wellbeing in small island communities”
Surrounded by sea, islands have long been seen as remote and isolated by necessity, though island life in practice involves movement both out of and back towards the island (Kohn, 2006; Nic Craith, 2020). Without enough attention being paid to the needs of island communities in decision- and policy-making affecting them, islands are also frequently associated with vulnerability (Kotsira, 2021), among others raising concerns about their sustainability and resilience (Ratter, 2017). If island life is already challenging as such, what is the further impact of climate change and climate-induced disasters on the mental health and wellbeing of islanders, particularly in small island communities?
This panel invites papers discussing ethnographic examples and primary research covering aspects such as:
‑Local understandings of mental health and wellbeing, and whether/how they are impacted by the climate crisis and the ways islanders respond to changing circumstances.
Access to mental health services and service gaps to be addressed so small island populations facing the by-products of climate change are supported.
‑How preconceptions of remoteness and isolation, vulnerability, sustainability and resilience are challenged by the circumstances created by the climate crisis
locally, and their impact on mental health and wellbeing.
‑The role of climate change in conceptualisations of the future on/of small islands, feelings of uncertainty, and their impact on islanders’ mental health and
wellbeing.
‑How the mental health and wellbeing of researchers are affected while doing research on small islands impacted by the climate crisis, including coping mechanisms and
research strategies.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION GUIDANCE
The deadline for submissions is 13 January 2025.
Please submit your paper abstract through the conference portal here: https://pay.durham.ac.uk/event-durham/abstract/info
Once you access the portal:
Choose from the drop-down menu the event you wish to attend: Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT) 2025.
Fill in your personal and professional details.
Provide the title of the paper you wish to present.
Select talk from the list of presentation options.
Upload your paper abstract. Your abstract must me no more than 250 words, and attached as a .doc or .pdf file (maximum upload size 10 MB).
Select from the drop-down menu the title of the panel you wish to join: Climate change, island change, and wellbeing in small island communities.
You do not have to be an RAI or ASA member to propose a paper, but please note that only papers submitted via conference portal will be considered.
More information about the conference can be found on the website: https://pay.durham.ac.uk/event-durham/health-environment-and-anthropology-heat-2024
Health, Environment, and Anthropology
Konferenz
In Person Conference at Durham University University, UK
Health, Environment, and Anthropology
23–24 April 2025
Durham University
As the world is getting fuller, faster, hotter, and sicker, HEAT asks how can anthropologists contribute to unfolding debates around health and environment on a changing and unequal planet? In what ways can medical and environmental anthropology work together and with other disciplines, communities, and stakeholders to help support the development of knowledge and resources for responding to environmental destruction and global heating?
As environmental and climate transform societies and ecologies around the world, it is imperative that anthropologists continue to seek new ways of thinking and speaking among themselves and with others about the relationships among humans, other-than-humans, the environment, and the planet. By examining the intricate web of interdependencies between societies, ecosystems, and environmental processes, anthropologists have an important role to play in understanding and addressing the complex challenges faced by our planet.
Panel proposals are invited in the following and related areas:
- Changing patterns and profiles of health, illness, and disease in response to environmental and climate change
- Changing human and more-than-human entanglements in relation to environmental and climate change
- Social movements and new forms of sociality arising from concerns about planetary health
- Environmental justice, inequality, and marginalized communities
- Demographic anxieties and the effects of migration, displacement, and armed conflict in the context of changing environments
- Impacts of climate change on reproductive health and rights
- Diverse ecological knowledges and indigenous perspectives on planetary health
- Sustainable food systems, agriculture, and nutrition
- Urbanization, globalization, and the transformation of human-environment relationships
- Health impacts of extractive industries and resource exploitation
- Ethical and/or methodological considerations in planetary health research and interventions
- Policy interventions and governance for planetary health
- Technological and design innovations for improving planetary health and dealing with the health impacts of environmental destruction and global heating
- Mental health and wellbeing in the context of climate change
- Interdisciplinary connections, including engagement with the Overlaps and contention between the frameworks of Planetary Health, Global Health, and One Health.
Panel proposals should include a title and 250 word abstract. The deadline is September 2024. A Call for Papers will then follow.
To submit a panel abstract, please follow this link: https://pay.durham.ac.uk/event-durham/health-environment-and-anthropology-heat-2024
Email the conference organisers at anthro.heat.conference@gmail.com
Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT)
Konferenz
A conference exploring the intersections of health and environmental anthropology
Call for Panels „Health, Environment, and Anthropology”
23–24 April 2025
Durham University in UK
Organized by the The Royal Anthropological Institute, University of Durham & University of Edinburgh present
As the world is getting fuller, faster, hotter, and sicker, HEAT asks how can anthropologists contribute to unfolding debates around health and environment on a changing and unequal planet? In what ways can medical and environmental anthropology work together and with other disciplines, communities, and stakeholders to help support the development of knowledge and resources for responding to environmental destruction and global heating?
As environmental and climate transform societies and ecologies around the world, it is imperative that anthropologists continue to seek new ways of thinking and speaking among themselves and with others about the relationships among humans, other-than-humans, the environment, and the planet. By examining the intricate web of interdependencies between societies, ecosystems, and environmental processes, anthropologists have an important role to play in understanding and addressing the complex challenges faced by our planet.
Panel proposals are invited in the following and related areas:
Changing patterns and profiles of health, illness, and disease in response to environmental and climate change
- Changing human and more-than-human entanglements in relation to environmental and climate change
- Social movements and new forms of sociality arising from concerns about planetary health
- Environmental justice, inequality, and marginalized communities
Demographic anxieties and the effects of migration, displacement, and armed conflict in the context of changing environments - Impacts of climate change on reproductive health and rights
Diverse ecological knowledges and indigenous perspectives on planetary health
Sustainable food systems, agriculture, and nutrition - Urbanization, globalization, and the transformation of human-environment relationships
- Health impacts of extractive industries and resource exploitation
Ethical and/or methodological considerations in planetary health research and interventions - Policy interventions and governance for planetary health
Technological and design innovations for improving planetary health and dealing with the health impacts of environmental destruction and global heating
Mental health and wellbeing in the context of climate change - Interdisciplinary connections, including engagement with the Overlaps and contention between the frameworks of Planetary Health, Global Health, and One Health.
Panel proposals should include a title and 250 word abstract. The deadline is 30th September 2024. A Call for Papers will then follow.
To submit a panel abstract, please follow this link: https://pay.durham.ac.uk/event-durham/health-environment-and-anthropology-heat-2024
Email the conference organisers at anthro.heat.conference@gmail.com
Influence of Changing Ecologies on Health and Human Adaptation at Local, National and Global level
Panel
CfP for Panel at HEAT 2025, Durham University, UK
Panel on “Influence of Changing Ecologies on Health and Human Adaptation at Local, National and Global level”
HEAT 2025
Durham University (UK)
April 23–24, 2025
Deadline 13 January 2025
Panel Abstract:
In Anthropology, research on interactions and the complex network of humans, health and environment started early with the cultural ecology theory and medical anthropology in the 1930s and 1960s respectively. The focus theme of these approaches had been adaptation including factors of genetics, physiology, culture and the approaches assumed that health is determined by environmental adaptation and that diseases arise from environmental imbalances. Further studies are required to understand the consumption patterns which are associated with health risks affecting human biology, ecology and the epidemiology of emerging and reemerging diseases. As researchers, the pressing question is the present scenario of regional, national and global affairs such as climate change, food insecurity, environmental health, demographic shifts, etc. Though there are ongoing consistent efforts to identify strategies and bring out solutions, yet, it requires extensive studies on ecological changes and the associated health disparities. With this backdrop, the panel invites papers/studies conducted within (but not limited to) South Asia to explore the cross-cultural impact of ecological changes on populations. It seeks to highlight health disparities arising from these changes and have an in-depth discussion on regional-specific health implications, as well as include trends in research methodology. The panel, in conclusion, will be addressing the ‘Ecology-Human Adaptation Imbalance’ and will try to identify the loopholes and bring out probable alternatives for region-specific populations.
The panel will explore the extent to which changing environmental conditions bring about adverse health consequences and adaptive imbalance under various ecological conditions. The panel invites papers on the theme of ‘Ecology-Human Adaptation Imbalance’ in the context of the following areas-
Traditional and marginalised communities.
Urban ecology.
Food environment.
Demography and access to Public Health.
Ageing and Environment Interaction
Adaptation to ecological vulnerabilities.
You can submit your abstracts in the Abstract Management Portal on or before 13 January 2025. The abstract should not be more than 250 words and the above link provides further information on the process of abstract submission. All papers must be submitted via the submission point on the conference website (below). This should be uploaded in .doc or .pdf format. Proposals must consist of:
Title of the panel you wish join;
The title of the paper you wish to present;
An abstract of no more than 250 words.
Paper proposals will be reviewed by panel convenor(s) and a decision on whether the paper has been accepted or rejected will come from them.
Only papers submitted via the link below will be considered by panel convenors.
Website Link- Event Durham – Abstract Management
Rules
You do not have to be an RAI or ASA member to propose a paper.
You may only present once at the conference. Panel chairs and discussants may also present a paper on a different panel.
All those attending the conference, including discussants and chairs, will need to register and pay to attend.
For any query, kindly contact: karvileena@gauhati.ac.in
Scaling toxic exposure; intergenerational responsibility, care and planetary health
Panel
CfP for a panel at Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference, Durham, UK
Call for abstracts to a panel on „Scaling toxic exposure; intergenerational responsibility, care and planetary health”
Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference
Durham University (UK)
April 23–24, 2025
The call is scheduled to close on 13 January
If you are interested, please submit an abstract via the Abstract Management portal. The website includes guidance on how papers should be submitted and a drop down list of panels a proposer can select from.
Details: Scaling toxic exposure; intergenerational responsibility, care and planetary health
Chemical exposure and their potential toxic arrangements are intergenerational, crossing lines of kinship and connecting relations to molecules, multiple bodies, ecologies and social spaces through non-linear temporalities. This presents significant challenges for ethnographic research confronting scales of exposure in the context of planetary health, escalating climate and ecological crises, profound inequality, and ongoing colonial formations. In military campaigns devastating lives, genocide brings ecocide. There is a need to examine the novel configurations of intergenerational responsibility, justice and care which arise at these junctures, as they index possibilities for other ways of life. This requires creative orientations to method, concepts and theory to address the complex temporal and spatial scales of toxic exposure.
Our panel seeks contributions from those engaging with chemical exposures and questions of intergenerational time and social relations within anthropology and/or in dialogue with other disciplines and those addressing the methodological challenges and conceptual approaches related to these themes.
Our panel is guided but not limited to the following questions:
-How can intergenerational chemical exposure be examined given that temporality of toxicity is not linear?
‑What are the possibilities for action – for ourselves as researchers, for our research communities, and for wider groups entangled in these landscapes – if conventional mechanisms of causality do not apply?
‑If the materiality and latency of chemical exposure articulates an absence in the present how can we examine the pervasive and elusiveness of toxicity?
‑What kinds of ethnographic (re)orientations are required to critically orient to the multiple temporalities of chemical toxicity? What can the work of comparison facilitate in examining scales of toxic exposure?
Where Are We Now? Visual and Multimodal Anthropology
Panel
Call for Panels: RAI FILM Online Conference 2025
Call for Panels: RAI FILM Online Conference 2025: „Where Are We Now? Visual and Multimodal Anthropology”
28 April – 2 May 2025 (Online only)
RAI FILM and the Film Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute invites panel, roundtable, and workshop proposals on any facet of visual, multisensory and multimodal Anthropology. We want to redouble our efforts to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all by learning more about how anthropologists are using these methods to respond to global challenges of our times. We encourage presentations that explore emergent methodologies and interactive approaches. We offer an inclusive forum to explore creative and innovative approaches, discuss collaborative and participatory methods and tackle practical problems.
Possible areas of contemporary interest might be dialogues between emergent and existing forms of film making; AI and changing technologies (extended reality (XR); storytelling and narrative, indigenous filmmaking; animation, and aesthetics.
In addition to this open call, we are also looking to highlight the global challenges for visual and multimodal anthropology. We ask how visual and multimodal methods can help to address the global challenges of our times. We want to learn how anthropologists are using visual and multimodal tools to respond to issues such as inequality, environmental protection, poverty, climate change, war, and justice. We welcome engagement with topics such as food and hunger, water, migration, forced displacement, extremism and intolerance, social inequalities, mental health, disability, discrimination and genocide, peace and justice, climate change and sustainability, renewables and just economies.
This virtual conference sits alongside the RAI FILM Festival which is a biennial international event celebrating the best in documentary filmmaking from around the globe and established in 1985 by the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK). The festival showcases new work from academic anthropologists and related disciplines, and from filmmakers at all levels of experience from students to professionals. It looks for fearless films that ask difficult questions, build bridges, seek redress and promote social justice and dialogue.
To see our two most recent editions see: https://festival.raifilm.org.uk/
RAI FILM Festival 2025 will celebrate our 40th anniversary both in person and online: https://raifilm.org.uk/rai-film-festival-2025/
In person film festival – 27–30 March 2025 at Watershed & Arnolfini, Bristol UK
Screenings, gala events, workshops and talks
Festival films available online throughout April 2025
Streaming 80 films available 24/7 worldwide
RAI FILM Conference – 28 April‑2 May 2025
Keynotes, panels, roundtable, workshops and paper presentations
Join us to explore the critical role of visual and multimodal anthropology in addressing contemporary global issues. Submit your proposals and contribute to a dynamic and inclusive forum for innovative and creative scholarly exchange.
Panel Submission Guidelines:
1. Panel, Roundtable, and Workshop Proposals:
- Title: Concise and descriptive.
- Short Abstract: a (very) short abstract of less than 300 characters,
- Long Abstract: a long abstract of 250 words
2. Important Dates:
- Call for Panels Closes: 1 October 2024
- Call for Papers Opens: 1 November 2024
- Call for Papers Closes: 17 January 2025
- Registration Opens: 24 February 2025
To Submit: All proposals must be made via an online form https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/raiff2025/panel-form
Queer Pharma: Experimentations in Bodies, Substances, Affects
Workshop
Workshop organized by Schwules Museum Berlin & Freie Universität Berlin
Call for Papers for the workshop “Queer Pharma: Experimentations in Bodies, Substances, Affects”
June 4–6, 2025
Schwules Museum Berlin & Freie Universität Berlin
Co-organized by Hansjörg Dilger and Max Schnepf
Queer Pharma: Experimentations in Bodies, Substances, Affects
Academic workshop with a public keynote by Kane Race (Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney) & an artistic session led by Tomás Espinosa
Abstract submission: November 24, 2024
Notifications of acceptance: December 6, 2024
Pre-circulation of paper drafts (3.000 words): May 4, 2025
Experimentations with pharmaceutical substances cradle queer potential – bodies and organisms transform, relations shift, emotions swell or fade into quietude. With capacities to intervene in life’s processes, drugs and medicines are not merely products of ‘Big Pharma,’ but agents of uncanny possibility. How might we imagine minor ‘pharmas’ in tension with or on the margins of the dominance, epitomized by the capitalized ‘Big’? Taking Queer Pharma as a counterpoint, this workshop invites submissions that ethnographically engage with uncertainties and improvisations in experimenting with bodies, substances, and affects – whether through drug use or other pharmaceutical practices (Race 2009, 2018). What new material and affective constellations might emerge if we were to focus on experimentation as a queer practice? […]
You can find the full CFP attached and also HERE.
Theorizing through the mundane: storying transformations in healthcare
Workshop
Workshop Department of Sociology, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Workshop „Theorizing through the mundane: storying transformations in healthcare”
Department of Sociology, University of Zurich, Switzerland
04–06.06.2025
CfP Deadline: 01.12 2024
Details:
As a ‘big story’ concern, transformations in healthcare abound: digitalization and the introduction of AI, major demographic transformations, antimicrobial resistances, soaring healthcare staff shortages, the emergence of transgender care, the ‘crisis’ of maternity and neonatal care, and ever increasing health inequalities are just a few of them. This workshop and special issue respond to such ‘big story’ concerns in healthcare by theorizing through ‘the mundane’.
STS has a long tradition – with different beginnings – of attending to and theorizing through ‘the mundane’. Think about for example the mundaneness of infrastructural work (Bowker and Star 1999), the fleetingly subtle ‘here-and-now’ (Verran 1999), the everydayness of marginalizing ‘invisible work’ (Star/Strauss 1989) and Latour’s doorstopper (Johnson/Latour 1988). More recently, it has been central to ‘care studies’ and ‘maintenance and repair studies’ marked through an attention to ‘daily life matters’
and ‘tinkering’ (Mol et al. 2010), ‘exnovation’ (Mesman 2008), ‘everyday ethics’ (Pols 2023), the easily devalued as ethico-political commitment (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011), and overlooked situations that take place in interstices of routine and breakdown (Denis et al. 2015).
In this workshop and special issue, we are drawing upon and extending these rich STS accounts on ‘the mundane’ to empirically investigate, think about and experiment with how STS scholars can relate to and intervene in ‘transformations’ in healthcare. After, or in addition to, the analytical sensitivities and concerns that have been developed in the care debate (Lindén and Lydahl 2021; Mol, Moser, Pols 2021; Martin, Myers, Viseu 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) and the field of valuation studies (Dussauge, Helgesson, Lee 2015), which have dominated research on healthcare in STS over the past decade, the special issue seeks to – empirically, analytically, and politically – take the next step. ‘Theorising through the mundane’ offers a version of STS that stays responsive to the ways we are living, dying and caring for bodies and diseases, and their transformations, in the first half of the 21st century; it offers an STS that transforms with and through these ways now, here, and in the future.
The workshop and special issue welcomes papers with an empirical focus on healthcare in the large sense. The contributions will explore questions such as:
– What counts as ‘mundane’ in particular situations, sites, practices of healthcare?
– How does an attention to ‘the mundane’ allow us to transform ‘big stories’ about current transformations in healthcare?
– How does ‘the mundane’ allow us to attend to modes of living and dying well?
– How to stay attentive to asymmetrical configurations and the non-innocence of ‘the mundane’?
– How does the lens of the mundane transform and extend STS theorizing?
The workshop will take place from the 4th to the 6th June 2025 at the Department of Sociology, University of Zurich. Participants need to submit a paper draft beforehand, which will be discussed during the workshop. On the third day, we will engage in
alternative formats (walking, writing, etc.) to think through the mundane.
The special issue will be based on the workshop and submitted to a major STS journal (currently envisaged S&TS).
If this speaks to you and you are interested in submitting a contribution to the workshop and special issue or only to the special issue, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words before the 1st December 2024 to: theorising_through_the_mundane@etik.com
If you have further questions, do not hesitate to contact us. We are looking forward to receiving your contribution.
Timeline:
2024 December 1: Open call for contributions closes
2024 December 31: Decisions of editors on who will participate in workshop and/or SI & communication of decision to applicants
2025 Beginning May: Submission of paper draft for workshop
2025 June 4–6: Workshop in Zurich (day 1 & 2 for discussion of paper drafts, day 3 with alternative formats for thinking through the mundane)
2025 September 30: Submission paper to a major STS journal (currently envisaged: S&TS)
Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Konferenz
Call for for the 3rd ENPA Biennial Conference, Münster, Germany
Call for submissions for the 3rd ENPA Biennial Conference, Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives
11–13 June 2025
Schloss, University of Münster, Germany
With a junior faculty pre-conference on 10 June 2025
This year’s theme explores the emerging intersections of psychological anthropologies and anthropological psychologies, fostering dialogue on the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. We seek contributions from anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines who wish to present their research, share reflections, and imagine future collaborations at the crossroads of these fields.
Conference Focus:
We aim to catalyze innovations in interdisciplinary engagements, particularly regarding: Methodological, theoretical, and conceptual reflections / Challenges to universalizing theories and interventions in the face of power asymmetries and critical epistemologies / Decolonizing and diversifying research methods, infrastructures, and curricula / Retrospective, current, and forward-looking perspectives on interdisciplinary work in academic and non-academic contexts.
Through this conference, we seek to create constructive dialogues that propose new frameworks for research, practice, and application in areas such as policy-making, therapy, healing, education, care, and resistance.
Call for Contributions:
We warmly welcome submissions for panels, papers, roundtables, and labs that engage with these themes. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary and experimental formats, including cross-media, film-based research, and public-facing projects. Formats can be either fully online or fully in-house but cannot combine both within the same session.
Submission Deadline: 31 January 2025.
Please send your submissions to: submissions@enpanthro.net
For detailed guidelines and updates, please see our detailed Call for Papers below (since the mailing list does not allow attachments). You will also find the call for papers on ENPA’s website soon: https://enpanthro.net/
————————–
Conference Theme
This conference takes the recent emergence of psychological anthropologies (and also anthropological psychologies) as an opportunity to reflect on the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration. It invites anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines who are interested or engaged in joining forces across disciplines to present their research and reflect on their scholarship, interventions, and academic landscapes. It is the main aim of the conference to catalyze or set forth ideas and imaginations for future inter/actions between psychologies and anthropologies.
The conference invites research papers and contributions on methodological, theoretical, and conceptual innovations and reflections on the potential of anthropologies and psychologies that are increasingly concerned with power asymmetries, critical epistemologies, and the effects of universalizing theories and interventions. In the face of growing human and non-human interconnectedness, psychological anthropology fosters insights into new forms of inequality, violence, and human subjectivity. The assumption that psychological and bio-psychiatric insights are to be imposed on human experience and behavior is itself open to question, creating tensions between universalizing and relativizing understandings of the human condition that collaborations between anthropology and psychology are uniquely positioned to address.
In addition to exploring current interdisciplinary engagements, the conference highlights perspectives on diversifying and decolonizing research methods, infrastructures, and curricula. Such self-reflexive and collaborative lenses seem paramount as they challenge hegemonic key assumptions on feeling, thinking, interacting, or learning.
The conference encourages participants to think of their contributions not just, or even primarily, as critiques but rather as constructive attempts to define and propose future trans- and interdisciplinary engagements at the intersections of psychology and anthropology and related disciplines. This conference is interested in retrospectives, current initiatives, and proposals for ways to do interdisciplinary research, analyze results, theorize, and apply them in academic and non-academic settings.
Through a fruitful dialogue within and between disciplines, the 3rd ENPA 2025 Biennial aims to foster new insights in research contexts, policymaking, therapy, healing, caring, resisting, or learning, to mention but a few initiatives. It explicitly invites interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations.
Call for Panels, Papers, Roundtables, and Labs
We warmly invite panel and paper submissions across the field of scholars working at the intersections of anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines. Aside from research papers, we explicitly encourage contributions that work with mixed, cross/media, or film as research methods or ways that communicate research in academic and non-academic publics. We also encourage roundtables on controversial questions and debates, and we invite creative labs that can be conducted both inside the venue and in the surrounding environments of the Schloss (including the Botanical Garden, Schloss Park, or the city).
Panel and paper submissions: We emphatically encourage panel submissions but will also accept a limited number of individual papers, which will be arranged into cohesive panels by the ENPA conference team. Each panel session includes 5 x 20-minute presentation slots and 20 minutes for open discussion. Possible formats are: 5 papers + 20 min discussion OR 4 papers, discussant + 20 min discussion.
Roundtables: We invite roundtables on controversial questions and debates comprising a maximum of 7 (international) guest speakers and 3 moderators.
Labs: We encourage labs in which experimental discussion formats are to be tested. This includes walk-alongs, walkie-talkies, emplaced learning, or artistic methods, to mention but a few examples, as well as projects that break new ground methodologically and pedagogically. A maximum of 4 organizers are encouraged to engage in creative formats and organize the number of participants, aims, and modalities.
All presentation types (i.e., panels, papers, roundtables, and labs can be organized as either exclusive online formats, or as exclusive in-house formats, but formats cannot be merged (i.e. it is not possible to have a mix of online and in-house presentations in one panel, roundtable, lab).
Please submit your panels, papers, roundtables, or labs by 31 January 2025 via email at submissions@enpanthro.net
Panel submissions should include:
· general abstract, max 250 words, please indicate if online or in-house
· abstract for each of the 4–5 papers, max 250 words each
· name, institutional affiliation, and email of all participants (chair/s, presenters, discussants)
Individual paper submissions should include:
· abstract, max 250 words, please indicate if online or in-house
· name, affiliation, and email
Roundtable submissions should include:
· general abstract, max 250 words, please indicate if online or in-house
· name, institutional affiliation, and email of all participants (moderators, guest speakers)
Lab submissions should include:
· general abstract in the theme, max 250 words, please indicate if online or in-house
· a note on aims, modalities, media, pedagogy, space, and format, max 250 words
· name, institutional affiliation, and email of all organizers
To ensure robust attendance across workshops, labs, and roundtables, the conference organizers may limit the total number of sessions available in these formats. Additionally, the ‘two-role rule’ applies to roles involving workshops, labs, roundtable organization, and positions as panelists or speakers: each participant may engage in no more than two distinct roles across these categories (e.g., workshop/lab/roundtable organization, speaker, moderator, or discussant). Dual roles within the same category are not permitted. Please note that when participating in a lab, the ‘two-role rule’ does not apply.
Registration will open in February 2025, and – as in previous years – we aim to keep fees as low as possible to ensure a diverse and accessible conference.
Further information on ENPA and the 3rd ENPA 2025 Biennial Conference can be found on our website: https://enpanthro.net. If you have any further questions regarding the conference, please do not hesitate to contact us at conference@enpanthro.net
Care in and out of Africa
Konferenz
CfP for a European Conference on African Studies
CfP for a conference on „Care in and out of Africa”
Prague, June 25–28 2025
Organisers : Lys Alcayna-Stevens, Clara Devlieger
Interested contributors should submit an abstract in English or French by 15 December 2024 via the ECAS paper submission form. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Lys (lys.alcayna-stevens@anthro.ox.ac.uk) and/or Clara (clara.devlieger@unil.ch).
Abstract: Care, both as a concept and a practice, is deeply embedded in everyday life in Africa. From the intimate acts of caregiving during pregnancy and illness to communal rites surrounding funerals, and the shared experience of food or prayer, care manifests through sensory and affective engagements that shape family and communal bonds. These practices are entangled within broader histories of migration, colonialism, and global health regimes. This panel interrogates how these entanglements are experienced, contested, and transformed in Africa and among its diasporas.
By bringing together scholars working at the intersection of care, senses, affect, and health, we explore questions such as: How is care negotiated in settings of state neglect? What do the tensions between patients and practitioners, and between biomedical protocols and everyday care practices, show about the entanglement of care with power, inequality, and governance? How do they reproduce inequalities or serve as sites of resistance against neoliberalism and biopolitical control? Who are the new providers and recipients of care, and under what conditions does care become politicised?
Changing care arrangements highlight intersections of political economy, embodied experience, and everyday practice. How does care bring moral and political economies together? How is care felt, sensed, and enacted in various contexts, from healthcare settings to domestic spaces? How does care extend beyond humans to include animals, plants, ecosystems, and ancestors – expanding the notion of what constitutes community and kinship and blurring the binary of care-giver and recipient?
Toxicity in Africa
Konferenz
Call for contributions for ECAS 2025 conference in Prague
Call for contributions to a Stream on “Toxicity in Africa”
ECAS 2025 conference Prague
June 25–28, 2025
Deadline for paper submissions: 15th December 2024.
Organizers: Wenzel Geissler, Natalie Jas, Susan Levine, Ruth Prince, Nick Rahier, Noemi Tousignant, Miriam Waltz.
Panel 1: Toxic accumulations: exposure, growth and environment in Africa.
This panel examines circulations, absorptions and accumulations of toxic substances at different scales, through and into bodies, organisms and materials, ecologies and landscapes, exploring entanglements with extraction, growth and development, and how forms of toxicity are noticed and acted upon.
Organizers: Ruth Prince and Noemi Tousignant
Panel 2. Pesticide politics in Africa: global circulation, production, research and regulation of agrochemicals.
Pesticides circulate globally, move between sites of production and use, connect laboratories, boardrooms and legislations, penetrate substrates, biota and ecologies, cut across scale from atmospheres to cells, and, persisting in bodies and environments, they mark temporalities and cut across times.
Organizers: Wenzel Geissler and Nathalie Jas
Roundtable Discussion: Pesticide politics in Africa: agrochemical intensification, agrochemical harm, and the search for alternative forms of growth.
In this roundtable experts and activists from various disciplines will discuss recent intensifications of agricultural production, ranging from industrialised plantations to small-scale farming – driven by industry pressure and (some) donor policies, fuelled by growing agrochemical input and changing land-use, linked by new financial and property regimes – as well as reflect on the search for alternative forms of sustainable food production.
Link: https://www.ecasconference.org/2025/call-for-papers/ (the panels are under “Anthropology”
Fever: Histories of (a) Disease, c. 1750–1840
Workshop
Workshop at Heidelberg Academy of Sciences
Workshop “Fever: Histories of (a) Disease, c. 1750–1840”
10–11 July 2025
Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (hosted by the ERC CoG Project FEVER based at Heidelberg University)
This workshop seeks to bring together historians interested in fever(s), widely considered the period’s most common and fatal ailment, in societies within or tied to the Atlantic world.
Workshop: “Fever: Histories of (a) Disease, c. 1750–1840”
We are excited to announce the workshop “Fever: Histories of (a) Disease, c. 1750–1840”, which will take place on 10–11 July 2025 at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Hosted by the ERC CoG Project FEVER based at Heidelberg University, this workshop seeks to bring together historians interested in fever(s), widely considered the period’s most common and fatal ailment, in societies within or tied to the Atlantic world.
While ‘fever’ is, in some sense, a universal aspect of human sickness, that concept’s meaning, experience, and implications varied significantly across different historical contexts. Our interest is in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth century’s taxonomies of fever, in the diagnostic repertoire of experts and laypersons prior to the advent of thermometry, but also in the sensory experiences, emotional registers, and environmental anxieties that fevers would often entail. Our inquiry into the histories of fever might also raise questions about the racialization of fever in imperial contexts, the disease category’s translation between different medical cultures, and fever’s dual role as both an epidemic and a quotidian ailment, to mention but a few possibilities. We seek to understand fever’s history across a broad geographical range, from typhus outbreaks in British workhouses to the tertian fevers that plagued viceregal Lima.
We invite paper proposals related to the conference’s thematic focus on fever in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Areas of interest include the history of medicine, science, and technology, as well as material, environmental, social, or religious histories of fever. Please submit an abstract (200–250 words) and a brief academic biography by 15 December 2024 to fever.project@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de. We will cover participants’ travel expenses (economy airfare or second-class train tickets) and provide one night’s accommodation near the conference venue. We look forward to welcoming you and engaging in inspiring discussions in Heidelberg.
fever.project@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
Towards new alternatives in social care: Transitions in the domestic, institutional and community care scenarios
Panel
CfP for the 9th APA (Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia)
in-person panel P100 – Towards new alternatives in social care: Transitions in the domestic, institutional and community care scenarios
9th APA (Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia)
Castelo (Portugal)
14 to 18 July 2025
Abstracts are due by January 13, 2025
https://apa2025.eventqualia.net/pt/inicio/painéis/chamada-comunicações/
We invite submissions of papers in both Spanish and English that provide new insights on this topic.
Abstract:
Care practices have significant relations to people’s existence and social reproduction. Caregiving involves a complex interaction between stakeholders in various scenarios (domestic, institutional, and community-based). Indeed, care is provided through a changing constellation of resources across families, the State, the market and civil society, all of which comprise the institutional structure of social care. Similarly, care is structured not only by gender but also by age, class, and ethnic/national origin. The traditional care options have been between domestic care and residential facilities. Institutionalization in a residential care home is an option that is usually reserved for worsening situations of dependence. Ageing in one’s own home is an aspiration, but this often takes place in housing and neighborhoods that are not adapted to the needs of the ageing, accelerating their vulnerable processes. In addition, territorial disparities (urban-rural areas) also account for inequalities in the access of care.
Our panel is oriented towards identifying the elements that can give rise to alternative formulas for social care, which make it possible to shift the central role played by families and women, favoring the dignification of paid and unpaid care. To understand the experiences in new care environments that try to foster new forms of articulation between social agents and their care surroundings (cohousing, care ecosystems, communities, etc.). We are interested in contributions that, based on ethnographic work and theoretical reflection, analyze innovative formulas in the articulation of long-term care providers, identifying their scope and limitations when subverting territorial, social and gender inequalities.
DDD17: Politics of Death
Konferenz
Bi-annual conference of the Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS)
DDD17: „POLITICS OF DEATH”
27–30 August 2025
University of Utrecht (Netherlands)
CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS
The Death, Dying and Disposal (DDD) Conference is the bi-annual conference of the Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS). The next edition will be hosted at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) and online from Wednesday 27 to Saturday 30 August 2025. For the upcoming DDD17 conference, we invite sessions that explore the broad topic of the Politics of Death.
Despite appearing as a universal biological event, death is and has never been neutral. Instead, it is deeply entwined with issues of (in)equality, access, and power dynamics. In today’s world, death is perhaps more politicized as it ever was before. Wars, environmental crises, global migration patterns, and failing states bring death close to our homes. At the same time, technological, digital, and medical advancements alter our approaches to dealing with, thinking about, researching, and working with death. Such developments are equally inherently political, both in their origins and their applications.
As practitioners and scholars, how do we navigate the political dimensions of death? How does the political shape our engagement with death? And how can we reflect on and potentially change our own positions within this political landscape?
For more information on the conference theme, please refer to our website: https://ddd17.sites.uu.nl/conference-theme/
We invite scholars and practitioners to submit a proposal for papers, organized panels, roundtables, workshops, or other formats by Saturday 30 November 2024. No exceptions to this deadline are possible.
We encourage proposals in four types of session formats:
Organised panels and individual papers
Panels will be structured in the traditional manner of individual paper presentations. This will be four (4) presentations of 15 minutes back-to-back, followed by a 30-minute discussion on the presentations. All organised panels are thus 90 minutes. The panels will be organized in a hybrid (i.e., including online participants) format, meaning paper presenters can present from home. Discussions will be organized using chat-moderators.
Roundtables
Roundtables of 90 minutes in which no more than five people discuss a particular theme or issue in front of (and subsequently with) an audience. While a roundtable may include short (approx. 5 min) contributions/presentations, the main idea is to create a lively debate, and not to focus on any one or multiple presenter(s). To be able to create such debate, roundtables will not be organized in a hybrid (i.e., including online participants) format.
Workshops
Workshops of 90 minutes are characterised by experimentation, collaboration, interaction and/or improvisation. The aim of workshops is to organise collective activities that are open-ended and cultivate possibilities for surprise, novelty, and learning. Workshops will be designed as interactive, reflexive sessions that prioritise exploration, rather than the discussion of already established research results. To make true collaboration possible and create safe space, the maximum number of persons per workshop is 16 (including workshop convenors). The workshops will not be organized in a hybrid (i.e., including online participants) format.
Other
We welcome you to share your ideas of other possible formats with us. If you would like to suggest a different format and/or are willing to run a session or activity with a different format, please let us know by sending an email to DDD17@uu.nl. The DDD17 selection committee will then decide if and how to accommodate your idea(s).
The Politics of Death
Konferenz
Conference organized by The Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS), University of Utrecht
17th biannual DDD conference „The Politics of Death”
The Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS)
University of Utrecht
27–30 August 2025
Details:
Despite appearing as a universal biological event, death is and has never been neutral. Instead, it is deeply entwined with issues of (in)equality, access, and power dynamics. In today’s world, death is perhaps more politicized as it ever was before. Wars, environmental crises, global migration patterns, and failing states bring death close to our homes. At the same time, technological, digital, and medical advancements alter our approaches to dealing with, thinking about, researching, and working with death. Such developments are equally inherently political, both in their origins and their applications.
As practitioners and scholars, how do we navigate the political dimensions of death? How does the political shape our engagement with death? And how can we reflect on and potentially change our own positions within this political landscape?
Politics is everywhere; everything is political. It’s woven into every facet of life, shaping how we live, die, and make sense of the worlds in between and beyond. It is the lens through which we address our biggest challenges and seize new opportunities. It shapes our sense of right and wrong, framing what we see as moral or immoral. It guides decisions, both consciously and unconsciously, in every setting – from the halls of government to the intimate spaces of home. It spans formal authority and hidden social power, threading through the spaces we inhabit, the rules we follow, and the symbols we embrace. It exists between people, environments and species, influencing everything from small exchanges to global regulations. In every interaction and institution, there’s an element of politics. Because of this, politics is everywhere, and everything down to the smallest detail is inherently political.
For more information on the conference theme, please refer to our website: https://ddd17.sites.uu.nl/conference-theme/
We invite scholars and practitioners to submit a proposal for papers, organized panels, roundtables, workshops, or other formats by Saturday 30 November 2024. No exceptions to this deadline are possible.
We encourage proposals in four types of session formats:
Organised panels and individual papers
Panels will be structured in the traditional manner of individual paper presentations. This will be four (4) presentations of 15 minutes back-to-back, followed by a 30-minute discussion on the presentations. All organised panels are thus 90 minutes. The panels will be organized in a hybrid (i.e., including online participants) format, meaning paper presenters can present from home. Discussions will be organized using chat-moderators.
Roundtables
Roundtables of 90 minutes in which no more than five people discuss a particular theme or issue in front of (and subsequently with) an audience. While a roundtable may include short (approx. 5 min) contributions/presentations, the main idea is to create a lively debate, and not to focus on any one or multiple presenter(s). To be able to create such debate, roundtables will not be organized in a hybrid (i.e., including online participants) format.
Workshops
Workshops of 90 minutes are characterised by experimentation, collaboration, interaction and/or improvisation. The aim of workshops is to organise collective activities that are open-ended and cultivate possibilities for surprise, novelty, and learning. Workshops will be designed as interactive, reflexive sessions that prioritise exploration, rather than the discussion of already established research results. To make true collaboration possible and create safe space, the maximum number of persons per workshop is 16 (including workshop convenors). The workshops will not be organized in a hybrid (i.e., including online participants) format.
Other
We welcome you to share your ideas of other possible formats with us. If you would like to suggest a different format and/or are willing to run a session or activity with a different format, please let us know by sending an email to DDD17@uu.nl. The DDD17 selection committee will then decide if and how to accommodate your idea(s).
Medical Anthropology Europe Conference 2025 Vienna: Redefinitions of Health and Well-being
Konferenz
CfP for Medical Anthropology Europe Conference 2025, Vienna
Medical Anthropology Europe Conference 2025 Vienna: „Redefinitions of Health and Well-being
Call for Panels and Roundtables is now OPEN
Contemporary Changes in Medically Assisted Reproduction: The Role of Social Inequality and Social Norms
Andere
CfP by Social Inclusion Journal
Call for papers for a special issue on: Contemporary Changes in Medically Assisted Reproduction: The Role of Social Inequality and Social Norms
Social Inclusion Journal
Deadline for Abstracts: 15.10.2025
Deadline for Papers: 30.03.2025
Social Inclusion, peer-reviewed journal indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science; Impact Factor: 1.4) and Scopus (CiteScore: 3.5), welcomes new and exciting research papers for its upcoming issue „Contemporary Changes in Medically Assisted Reproduction: The Role of Social Inequality and Social Norms,” edited by Anne-Kristin Kuhnt, Jörg Rössel, and Heike Trappe.
Since, in 1978, the first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization was born, further technological advances, like egg freezing, pre-implantation diagnostics, and gene editing (CRISPR) have revolutionized the conditions for human fertility. This thematic issue focuses on how the social context, in particular social inequalities and social norms, shapes attitudes towards these technologies, their use, and their impact. We are interested in articles that explore how attitudes and public discourse on these technologies are shaped by prevailing gender norms and moral orientations in societies.
Authors interested in submitting a paper to this issue are encouraged to read the full call for papers here