Veranstaltungskalender
An dieser Stelle präsentieren wir ausgewählte Veranstaltungen aus dem interdisziplinären Arbeitsfeld Ethnologie und Medizin.
Wir freuen uns über Veranstaltungshinweise an events@agem.de
Vergangene Veranstaltungen
2020
CONFERENCE - Health and health care in Europe. Between inequalities and new opportunities
Andere
17-19 June 2020, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
Call for Papers
After successful conferences in Lisbon (2016) and Torino (2018), the Mid-term Conference of the Research Network of Sociology of Health and Illness, European Sociological Association (ESA RN16) will be hosted by Jagiellonian University, the oldest university in Poland. In magical Kraków we will undoubtedly enjoy a fruitful, academically inspiring and engaging conference. We will have a comfortable conference venue, delicious and healthy cuisine, beautiful historical monuments, nice hotel base and a friendly, supportive atmosphere. We plan to make the conference full of inspiring presentations, relevant discussions and lively networking opportunities. We are planning a Special Issue of a journal from the conference.
The task of policy makers is to reduce inequalities, which means giving everyone the same opportunities to lead a healthy life. But the task for sociologists is to research and explain what does, or could, cause inequalities and to propose solutions. We know that education, employment status, income level, gender and ethnicity and other factors have a great impact on life expectancy and quality of life. In modern Europe all these social factors are fueled by migration, political tribulations and the neoliberal economy. Value crises, risk, and individualism do not help. Developments in medicine, in medical technology and biotechnology, new treatments and new procedures, and many other things which become an opportunity to cure and care, can be a source of further inequalities. That is why involving social science, in particular sociology, in the discourse about health and health care is important.
Inviting you to Kraków we offer various activities you may wish to participate in:
- Plenary session. Graham Scambler and Zofia Słońska will be our keynote speakers. The title of their presentations will be announced soon.
- How to publish? Karen Lowton on behalf of the Journal Sociology of Health and Illness will present some tips.
- Regular session. We plan 18 sessions. If you want to submit an abstract for an oral presentation please send your abstract (using the form provided) with the session name and other details by the deadline of 28.02.2020 to ESARN16conference@uj.edu.pl. For further information please see our CfP attached our visit our website Here.
- Poster Session. If you want to present a poster please send your application (on the form provided) the deadline of 28.02.2020 to ESARN16conference@uj.edu.pl.
- Meet a friend. We plan to organize meetings for all who want to find a partner for article or research grant proposal. If you are looking for colleague with whom you could write article or prepare a grant application, please send application (on the form provided) by the deadline of 28.02.2020 to ESARN16conference@uj.edu.pl.
- PhD and Early Career Researchers' Workshop. The call for papers will be launched soon.
For submitting your abstract please use the appropriate form (attached to this email) and send it to ESARN16conference@uj.edu.pl. The address of the webpage of the conference will be announced soon. The registration of the conference will be made online after the launch of the webpage.
Local Organising Committee: Maria Świątkiewicz-Mośny, Aleksandra Wagner, Natalia Ożegalska-Łukasik
Scientific Committee ESA RN16 Board : Ellen Annandale, Ana Patricia Hilário, MariaŚwiatkiewicz-Mośny, Francesca Sirna, Guido Giarelli, Trude Gjernes, Lia Lombardi, Marta Gibin
FILM FESTIVAL - Health for All
Andere
The World Health Organization is launching its first ever film festival on 16, 21 and 22 May 2020. The WHO Health for All Film Festival invites independent film-makers, production companies, NGOs, communities, students, and film schools from around the world to submit their original short films on health. The submissions can be on any health issue and/or social and environmental determinants of health for the first two categories (non-fiction and animation). The third category focuses on nurses or midwives to pay tribute to the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife in 2020. Only films completed between 1 January 2017 and 30 January 2020 are eligible for the festival. Closing date for entries is 30 January 2020.
We would very much appreciate and would be most grateful if you would kindly spread the word as widely as possible to all your networks and contacts. We would like to have a huge number of submissions in the category of health and environment focusing on climate change; air pollution; water, sanitation and health; chemical safety; occupational health and radiation to name just a few. Please also keep us updated on all the networks you have shared this with.
For further information please contact Gilles Reboux, email rebouxg@who.int
Please use the following online multilingual tools, the webpages contain the application rules and access to submission tool:
Youtube link to embed everywhere!
English: https://youtu.be/GporpcgO310
Spanish: https://youtu.be/nFW_n5UWwOM
Multilingual webpages:
https://www.who.int/film-festival
https://www.who.int/es/film-festival
https://www.who.int/fr/film-festival
https://www.who.int/ru/film-festival
https://www.who.int/ar/film-festival
https://www.who.int/zh/film-festival
Social media kit: https://who.canto.global/b/MUT1S
CONFERENCE - Sexualmedizin und Sexualtherapie
Andere
Die diesjährige 6. Wiener Tagung für Interdisziplinäre Psychotherapie behandelt das Thema „Sexualmedizin und Sexualtherapie“ und ist die erste einer Veranstaltungsreihe über Sexualität und Sexualstörungen. Am 6. Juni 2020 folgt die Wiener Frühjahrstagung für Forensische Psychiatrie zum Thema „Sexualität und Gewalt“. Den Abschluss bildet am 7. November 2020 die Wiener Herbsttagung für Transkulturelle Psychiatrie mit dem Schwerpunkt „Sexualität, Sexualstörungen und Kultur“.
Die Beziehung zwischen Sexualmedizin und Sexualtherapie ist vielschichtig und komplex. Beide Fachbereiche stehen nicht in einer unmittelbaren Kausalbeziehung zueinander, sind aber auch nicht unabhängig voneinander zu sehen. Waren es ursprünglich die Gynäkologie und die Andrologie, die wesentliche Beiträge zur Sexualmedizin leisteten, so fanden in den letzten 20 Jahren Sexualstörungen auch in der Psychiatrie, der Psychosomatik und den Neurowissenschaften zunehmend Beachtung. Das Spektrum reicht von systemischen Ansätzen, über emotionsfokussierte Therapien, bis zu körperorientierten Therapieformen.
Inzwischen gehört das anfängliche Ringen von Sexualmedizin und Sexualtherapie um die Deutungshoheit für Verständnis und Behandlung von sexualstörungen weitgehend der Vergangenheit an. Diese interdisziplinär angelegte Tagung will daher einen weiteren Beitrag zur Zusammenarbeit der beiden Fächer leisten, die einem breiteren Publikum vorgestellt werden sollen.
Einige Themen
Die psychosomatischen Grundlagen der Sexualmedizin
– Kurt Loewit
Grundlagen der systemischen Sexualtherapie
– Karina Kehlet Lins
Sexocorporel – Grundlagen und Konzepte
– Miriam Foresta
Pornographiesucht – Ursachen und Behandlung
– Heike Melzer
Sexualität bei Borderline-Störungen
– Leonie Kampe
Sexualstörungen und Psychopharmakotherapie
– Ulrich Rabl
Anmeldung, Programme und Online-Formular: www.ce-management.com
Transfigurations of Uncertainty in Health and Medicine
Konferenz
XI Medical Anthropology at Home (MAAH) Conference
In the interconnected and polycentric world in which we live, certainty and uncertainty of knowledge are both central to the ways of how health and medicine are organised, experienced and practiced. In spite of the rapidly growing extension of science-based knowledge, this very knowledge, its reliability, validity and relevance has become contested. Populism, scepticism or plain hostility towards science, and “alternative facts” sometimes replace informed debates. This crisis of knowledge-informed practices are all the more relevant in the face of suffering, illness and dying, when the viability and wellbeing of oneself and of those close to us are threatened and when traditional ways of coping are called into question. The quest for certainty has always been a defining feature of medical practice, and especially for diagnosis and subsequent treatment options. In this modality, this quest and the arising uncertainty are not only inherent in medical practice per se, but, importantly, they are also a product of the interconnectedness of various heterogeneous social domains and processes, such as neoliberalisation, the leaping pace of technological innovation, or new alliances of political actors.
We suggest the recently developed concept of transfiguration as an analytical lens by which to explore the interconnectedness of social domains as they are entangled with current social and medical practices. The concept lends itself particularly well, we believe, for tackling and comprehending the heterogeneity and complexity involved in current medical practices, of which uncertainty is an important aspect. Transfiguration follows the approach of figurational theory, developed by Norbert Elias (1978), and further develops the work on sociality of Marilyn Strathern (1988), Long and Moore (2013) and others. By transfiguration Mattes, Hadolt and Obrist (under review) refer to “(1) the constantly unfolding process of particular extended figurations encountering, affecting and becoming enmeshed in each other as well as (2) the (temporarily) stabilized figurational arrangements emerging from these enmeshments”. We aim for a posthumanist perspective by putting centre stage the “processual engagement and disengagement of humans with each other and their material and non- material worlds within and across particular figurations, i.e. relations of power and webs of social interdependences” (Mattes et al.; see also Kehr et al. 2019).
As an analytical tool, uncertainty can both be conceptualised as a genuine epistemological crisis of current medical practice and as an ontological state of the patients and practitioners who finds themselves thrown into the above described nexus. Which are crucial modes of current uncertainties in health and medicine and how do they emerge? How do they shape and yield medical practices, discourses and environments? In which ways can we make sense of the dynamic connectivity that links medicine with a multitude of other societal domains such as policy-making, public administration, scientific research, the private profit-making sector, humanitarian work, the media, religion or law, and by doing so engenders forms of uncertainty? What are the manners by which we can understand health related phenomena and the implicated uncertainty as they become manifest and change over time – sometimes incrementally, sometimes abruptly – in various practices, constellations and atmospheres? How, finally, can we make sense of the apprehensions, concerns, hopes, imagined futures and feelings of the people who affect and are affected by such processes as they constitute their specific worlds and themselves and vice versa?
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These are central questions that the 11th MAAH conference 2020 seeks to discuss. We invite contributions, preferably both ethnography-based and theory inspired, that address these issues in one or more of the following four thematic clusters:
(1) Medical futures
Besides ‘risk talk’, medical practice has always been underpinned by a discourse on hope and a better future. The proclaimed revolutions in medicine, such as the definite cancer cure, has characterised medical popular discourse and imagination ever since the big technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th century. Today, these discourses are focussed on the usages of synthetic biology, gene editing, and of Big Data and artificial intelligences. The digitalisation of medicine and of health care data of patients has been dominating public debates for the last twenty years. Public health officials have resorted to a discourse of the ‘technical fix’ of medical problems, and of prevention and risk to tame uncertainty by casting questions of factuality and potentiality in terms of probability. In doing so, they contribute to a general climate of uncertainty, e.g. on debates of controlling epidemics and pandemics. This is becoming ever more so political practice when it comes to the future impact of climate change on health and illness
(2) Medical technologies, infrastructures and materialities
Technological advances of diagnostic and therapeutic medical procedures and the – expected and unexpected – field of action that they afford have at the same time enabled and hindered innovation. In part, this has been due to the pace in which bureaucracy and the specific governance of its application often lag behind. Policy makers in the UK, for example, allow for the innovative usage of ultrasound on a private commercial level in form of keepsake ultrasounds but the usage of portable ultrasound for diagnostic use in GP surgeries is not allowed. Necessary changes in data protection of individuals have led to an ever-increasing burden of bureaucracy on researchers and medical practitioners, leading to the development of new professions such as data managers. These emerging professions deal with the spaces of uncertainty that Big Data produces. Medical procedures that rely heavily on technology, such as remote surgery, are changing the relationship between medical practitioners and patients, but also between one generation of practitioners and another. Increasingly, body parts are even more decontextualized from real humans than they were ever before in medical history. Tablet computers are increasingly used in rural areas of the Global South to scan and send medical information such as ultrasound images to specialised medical centres for diagnostic purposes, to give the impression of diagnostic certainty. Despite offering an opportunity to arrive at a better diagnosis, these technologies also contribute to the lack of funding for rural areas. The relationship between the Global South and Global North has influenced not only the ways of how medical products and services are produced and distributed and how ideas, materials and humans travel, but also research practices, e.g. when it comes to clinical trials and stem cell research and their ethical dilemmas.
(3) Moral quandaries and the policing of health
Ethical and moral dilemmas in medicine and medical research practice have contributed to the development of new legal practices in some countries but not in others and fostered medical tourism based on these differences within and beyond the EU. The commodification of health has also contributed to these phenomena, especially when it comes to personalised medical devices such as self-tracking wearables or ultrasound keepsakes. These practices have opened up new areas of quantification/economisation of health and health care, including new health insurance regimes. Gene editing is becoming a new reality and brings about the moral question of who can afford it and thus who can benefit from it. Biorepositories enable researchers to specify trends in population health but at the same time reduce complex individuals who live in all kinds of contexts to a set of numbers in a decontexualised data set. On the public health level, we encounter different modes of moralities and novel alliances such as between NGOs and big business, for instance in the case of immunisation and vaccination policies where big business funds vaccination policies. Unregulated technologies produce
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a myriad of data that could potentially be used to inform public health policies in ways that support the interests of particular stakeholders conflicting with public interest. The public, but also medical practitioners, researchers, and companies seemingly demand a certainty that policy makers, legal courts, or public health, with its discourse on probability, often cannot guarantee.
(4) Feelings, subjectivities and ways of navigating health and illness
We know that emotions, affects, and feelings do not only play a part in how individuals make decisions about their care, but they also heavily influence policy making in public health. Anxiety arises when uncertainties proliferate. Policy makers used psychological terms such as resilience and coping strategies rather than addressing anxieties. This enables a drive towards making and expecting populations to be more resilient, especially when it comes to health challenges in relation to aging, particular life styles and changing climate. The drive towards self-optimisation and a discourse in policy making of individual responsibility contribute to these new subjectivities of health and illness which give a false sense of certainty in numbers. On a personal level, many people interpret and deal with these uncertainties and responsibilities by resorting to conspiracy theories and believing in “fake news” (e.g. concerning vaccination and refugees that are blamed of spreading diseases).
We are looking forward to receiving your propositions for contributions and an exciting conference.
On behalf of the MAAH Scientific Committee, Bernhard Hadolt and Andrea Stöckl
References
Elias, Norbert (1978). What is Sociology? New York, Columbia University Press.
Kehr, Janina, Hansjoerg Dilger & Peter van Eeuwijk (2019). Transfigurations of health and the moral economy of medicine: Subjectivities, materialities, values. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 143(2018): 1-20.
Long, Nicholas J. & Henrietta L. Moore (2013). Introduction: Sociality's New Directions. In: N. J. Long & H. L. Moore, Sociality: New Directions. New York, Berghahn Books: 1-24.Mattes, Dominik, Bernhard Hadolt & Brigit Obrist (under review). Rethinking Sociality and Health through Transfiguration.
Strathern, Marilyn (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, Calif. [etc.], University of California Press. ***
Conference Format and Submission Process
We invite contributions addressing the conference theme and issues mentioned above. Please submit an abstract (max: 250 words) and a biographical statement by December 1, 2019, to maah2020(at)univie.ac.at. A notification of acceptance will be sent to you by December 20, 2019. Due to the workshop-character of the conference, the number of participants presenting a paper will be limited to 30. Participants are expected to read all papers in advance. Complete papers (max: 3000 words) to be distributed to all participants must be submitted by April 1, 2020.
Location and Transportation
The conference will take place at the Schüttkasten Geras, Austria, located in a lovely rural area about 80 minutes by coach north of Vienna. The Schüttkasten originally served as grain storage building of the adjacent Premonstratensian monastery Geras. Recently, the building has been renovated and converted into a hotel and conference centre. For more details see: https://www.schuettkasten-geras.at/de/schuettkasten/der-schuettkasten.html
Transportation by coach from and to Vienna city centre or Vienna airport will be provided. More details will follow.
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Conference Fees & Payment
The conference fee is estimated at 500 € (including 3 nights accommodation, all meals (excl. drinks), banquet dinner, coach from and to Vienna city centre or Vienna airport). Payment information will follow with notification of acceptance.
General Inquiries & Registration Information:
maah2020(at)univie.ac.at
There will be a MAAH 2020 website for the conference. The web address will be communicated at a later date. Any further information and conference updates will be conveyed via the conference website.
XI MAAH 2020 Scientific Organizing Committee:
Bernhard Hadolt (University of Vienna): bernhard.hadolt(at)univie.ac.at Andrea Stöckl (University of East Anglia): A.Stockl(at)uea.ac.uk