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
Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT) conference
Konferenz
Hybrid conference
We are delighted to share details on the forthcoming Health, Environment, and AnThropology (HEAT) conference
23rd and 24th April 2025
Durham University and online
Please follow this link for details and program
The HEAT team
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
Intimate mediation: hormones and endocrine disruption across species, place, and time
Panel
CfP for Panel at 2025 Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference, UK
CFP below for a panel on „Intimate mediation: hormones and endocrine disruption across species, place, and time”
2025 Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference
Durham University, UK
April 23–24, 2025
Co-organised by Durham and Edinburgh universities and sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Society (RAI)
The call is scheduled to close on 13 January, although we will keep this under review and extend if it seems necessary.
Abstracts can be submitted via the Abstract Management portal. The website includes guidance and a list of panels a proposer can select from.
Panel #21: „Intimate mediation: hormones and endocrine disruption across species, place, and time”
Keywords: hormones, chemicals, endocrine disruption, EDCs, plastics, prescription drugs, side effects, alterlife, green chemistry
This panel invites consideration of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) as a key link between health and environment. EDCs are synthetic chemicals that interact with the hormonal messaging processes of humans and other animals, commonly found in everyday items, notably many plastics. These ubiquitous substances transcend local environments through weather patterns and industrial chains, defy consumer rationales of personal protection through „organic” or „green” choices, and have effects that are unpredictable and may remain latent for generations. EDCs are now constitutive of our bodies, complicating any ideas about an un-altered „pure” state, and have been linked to health issues as disparate as diabetes, endometriosis, asthma, early puberty, obesity, and gender dysphoria. There is good reason to consider hormonally-active pharmaceuticals as EDCs, particularly given how they can exceed the consumer’s bodily system and enter into waterways and other shared environments. EDCs trouble standard political positions around individual autonomy and choice, complicating conservative impulses towards protectionism and immunity. Studying „the exposome” troubles standard ways of making knowledge about chemicals: chemical effects come into being in interaction with one another instead of as isolated variables, and timing of exposure often matters more than dosage (counter to the toxicological maxim ‚the dose makes the poison’). Add to this the lobbying pressure from petroleum and chemical industries, and it is clear why it can be profoundly difficult to acknowledge and take action about EDCs. Yet, some medical research centers, activist groups, artists, and even industrial initiatives around „green chemistry” are doing so. This nexus begs further anthropological inquiry.
Panel More-than-human health in an interdependent world
Konferenz
Conference at Univeristy of Durham
Panel on „More-than-human health in an interdependent world”
Health, Environment, and Anthropology (HEAT) Conference
University of Durham
April 23–24 2025
CfP deadline: 13 Jan
With Wim Van Daele (UiA), Heidi Fjeld (UiO), Jelle Wouters (RTC), and Elena Neri (UiA)
Details: 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…
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?
Abschlusskonferenz des deutsch-französischen Forschungsprojekts The Social Production of Space and Age
Konferenz
Conference in Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Abschlusskonferenz des deutsch-französischen Forschungsprojekts „The Social Production of Space and Age” (SPAGE)
More info: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/128738740/SPAGE
Die Konferenz „Crossing Boundaries: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Perspectives on (Re)Configurations of Space in Ageing Societies“ findet am 26. & 27. Mai 2025 an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Campus Westend, Casino, Raum
1.801 (Renate von Metzler-Saal) statt.
Es erwarten Sie spannende Vorträge und Diskussionen zu Perspektiven auf das Zusammenspiel von Altern und Raum aus unterschiedlichen Disziplinen und Ländern. Das detaillierte Programm finden Sie hier: https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/170314818.pdf
Wir freuen uns über Ihre Teilnahme. Zur Registrierung nutzen Sie bitte diesen Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/crossing-boundaries-final-conference-of-research-project-spage-26–2705-tickets-1209545586409?aff=oddtdtcreator
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
“Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?”
Panel
CfP for an hybrid panel at the 23rd Annual STS Conference Graz 2025
CfP for the panel “Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?”
STS Conference Graz 2025 “Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies“
May 5 to 7, 2025 and on Zoom
Convenors:
Erik Aarden (University of Klagenfurt)
Mara Köhler (Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences)
Victoria Meklin (University of Klagenfurt)
Ingrid Metzler (Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences)
The call for abstracts is open until January 20, 2025
Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?
Over the past three decades, scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields, such as Medical Sociology, Medical Anthropology, Health Policy Analysis, and Bioethics, have engaged with the phenomenon of “testing in biomedicine.” Much of this work has focused on specific types of tests or their uses in distinct settings. For instance, beginning in the late 1980s, scholars have studied genetic testing as it was envisioned, developed, and used in clinical, public health, or recreational practices, or compared the moralities of the regulatory frameworks sustaining and limiting its uses. Simultaneously, scholars contributing to a sociology of diagnosis have investigated how testing in clinical practices is involved in “making up people” (Hacking, 2002). More recently, research has addressed the development, use, and regulations of testing in emerging fields such as translational medicine and precision medicine, paying special attention to the political economies of testing and the authorities involved in their governance. Last but not least, emerging bodies of scholarship have explored the role of testing as a governing tool in global health initiatives and pandemic management, particularly in response to COVID-19.
In this panel, we aim to use testing as a boundary object to open up a conversation between these different areas of research. Building on work performed under the label of the “anthropology of medical testing” (Street and Kelly, 2021) and the “sociology of diagnosis and screening” (Petersen and Pienaar, 2021), we propose the label of “social studies of (biomedical) testing” or “biomedical testing studies” to encourage interdisciplinary engagements.
We invite both empirical and theoretical contributions that engage with the envisioning, development, use, evaluation, and regulations of testing across diverse biomedical domains. These may include but are not limited to: testing practices in clinical, public health or social service settings; DIY-testing; and economic, legal, moral, and political dimensions of testing as well as the absences or non-use of tests.
Conference Page: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/
Abstract Submission: https://www.conftool.com/sts-conference-graz-2025/
Call Link: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:5f98cc92-aa88-4cd7-a930-ceff51ffc631
List of Panels: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/calls/call-for-abstracts/
Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing
Panel
Hybrid Panel
CfP to the panel “Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing”
23rd Annual STS Conference Graz 2025: “Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies.“
May 5 to 7, 2025
Graz (Austria), online hybrid
The call for abstracts is open until January 20, 2025.
„Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?”
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to engage scholars in a conversation on testing in biomedicine. We welcome contributions that explore the development, uses, regulation, and governance of various biomedical tests across clinical, public health, and recreational contexts.
Conference Page: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/
Abstract Submission: https://www.conftool.com/sts-conference-graz-2025/
Call Link: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:5f98cc92-aa88-4cd7-a930-ceff51ffc631
List of Panels: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/calls/call-for-abstracts/
Convenors:
Erik Aarden (University of Klagenfurt)
Mara Köhler (Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences)
Victoria Meklin (University of Klagenfurt)
Ingrid Metzler (Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences)
Long Abstract:
Over the past three decades, scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields, such as Medical Sociology, Medical Anthropology, Health Policy Analysis, and Bioethics, have engaged with the phenomenon of “testing in biomedicine.” Much of this work has focused on specific types of tests or their uses in distinct settings. For instance, beginning in the late 1980s, scholars have studied genetic testing as it was envisioned, developed, and used in clinical, public health, or recreational practices, or compared the moralities of the regulatory frameworks sustaining and limiting its uses. Simultaneously, scholars contributing to a sociology of diagnosis have investigated how testing in clinical practices is involved in “making up people” (Hacking, 2002). More recently, research has addressed the development, use, and regulations of testing in emerging fields such as translational medicine and precision medicine, paying special attention to the political economies of testing and the authorities involved in their governance. Last but not least, emerging bodies of scholarship have explored the role of testing as a governing tool in global health initiatives and pandemic management, particularly in response to COVID-19.
In this panel, we aim to use testing as a boundary object to open up a conversation between these different areas of research. Building on work performed under the label of the “anthropology of medical testing” (Street and Kelly, 2021) and the “sociology of diagnosis and screening” (Petersen and Pienaar, 2021), we propose the label of “social studies of (biomedical) testing” or “biomedical testing studies” to encourage interdisciplinary engagements.
We invite both empirical and theoretical contributions that engage with the envisioning, development, use, evaluation, and regulations of testing across diverse biomedical domains. These may include but are not limited to: testing practices in clinical, public health or social service settings; DIY-testing; and economic, legal, moral, and political dimensions of testing as well as the absences or non-use of tests.
Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?
Panel
CfP for hybrid panel
CfP for a Panel on “Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?”
23rd Annual STS Conference Graz 2025, “Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies“
May 5 to 7, 2025. The call for abstracts is open until January 20, 2025
Convenors:
Erik Aarden (University of Klagenfurt)
Mara Köhler (Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences)
Victoria Meklin (University of Klagenfurt)
Ingrid Metzler (Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences)
“Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?”
Over the past three decades, scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields, such as Medical Sociology, Medical Anthropology, Health Policy Analysis, and Bioethics, have engaged with the phenomenon of “testing in biomedicine.” Much of this work has focused on specific types of tests or their uses in distinct settings. For instance, beginning in the late 1980s, scholars have studied genetic testing as it was envisioned, developed, and used in clinical, public health, or recreational practices, or compared the moralities of the regulatory frameworks sustaining and limiting its uses. Simultaneously, scholars contributing to a sociology of diagnosis have investigated how testing in clinical practices is involved in “making up people” (Hacking, 2002). More recently, research has addressed the development, use, and regulations of testing in emerging fields such as translational medicine and precision medicine, paying special attention to the political economies of testing and the authorities involved in their governance. Last but not least, emerging bodies of scholarship have explored the role of testing as a governing tool in global health initiatives and pandemic management, particularly in response to COVID-19.
In this panel, we aim to use testing as a boundary object to open up a conversation between these different areas of research. Building on work performed under the label of the “anthropology of medical testing” (Street and Kelly, 2021) and the “sociology of diagnosis and screening” (Petersen and Pienaar, 2021), we propose the label of “social studies of (biomedical) testing” or “biomedical testing studies” to encourage interdisciplinary engagements.
We invite both empirical and theoretical contributions that engage with the envisioning, development, use, evaluation, and regulations of testing across diverse biomedical domains. These may include, but are not limited to: testing practices in clinical, public health or social service settings; DIY-testing; and economic, legal, moral, and political dimensions of testing as well as the absences or non-use of tests.
For more information and to apply visit:
Conference Page: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/
Abstract Submission: https://www.conftool.com/sts-conference-graz-2025/
Call Link: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:5f98cc92-aa88-4cd7-a930-ceff51ffc631
List of Panels: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/calls/call-for-abstracts/
Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World
Workshop
Book presentation in the framework of the webinar series „Unfolding Finitudes: Current Ethnographies of Aging, Dying and End-of-Life Care”
Book Presentatation: „Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World”
Webinar series Unfolding Finitudes: Current Ethnographies of Aging, Dying and End-of-Life Care
Tuesday 20 May 2025, 17.00–18.30 CEST
https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2025/05/imagistic-care-growing-old-in-a-precarious-world
This session will focus on the edited volume Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World (Fordham University Press), and we have the great pleasure of having both editors, Prof. Cheryl Mattingly (University of Southern California) and Prof. Lone Grøn (VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research), as well as three of the contributing authors, Dr. Harmandeep Kaur Gill (University of Copenhagen), Dr. Maria Louw (Aarhus University), and Prof. Lotte Meinert (Aarhus University), present for this talk.
Registration: Please register here for this webinar: https://fd24.formdesk.com/universiteitleiden/ImagisticCare. You will then receive the zoom-link for the webinar one week in advance.
About the book
Imagistic Care explores ethnographically how images function in our concepts, our writing, our fieldwork, and our lives. With contributions from anthropologists, philosophers and an artist, the volume asks: How can imagistic inquiries help us understand the complex entanglements of self and other, dependence and independency, frailty and charisma, notions of good and bad aging, and norms and practices of care in old age? And how can imagistic inquiries offer grounds for critique?
Cutting between ethnography, phenomenology and art, this volume offers a powerful contribution to understandings of growing old. The images created in words and drawings are used to complicate rather than simplify the world. The contributors advance an understanding of care, and of aging itself, marked by alterity, spectral presences and uncertainty.
About Unfolding Finitudes
The European Research Council-funded Globalizing Palliative Care project (www.globalizingpalliativecare.com) at Leiden University is hosting a three-monthly webinar series that highlights current anthropological research on care, aging and dying. During this series, invited speakers present their recent or ongoing ethnographic work in this field. Our aim is to create a platform for discussion of novel anthropological perspectives on unfolding finitudes at the end of life.
Freiburger Filmforum 2025
Film
Filmfestival in Freiburg, Germany
Freiburger Filmforum
27.5–1.6.2025
Dear Film Enthusiasts, get your calendars out and look forward to a festival week filled with high-quality films, engaging exchanges, and festival atmosphere! From May 27 to June 1, 2025, the Freiburger Filmforum Festival of Transcultural Cinema [1] will take place at the Kommunales Kino Freiburg. With numerous guests
and an extensive accompanying program, we are celebrating a double anniversary: 40 years of the Filmforum and the 10th anniversary of our Students’ Platform.
The festival addresses both contemporary and historical, socio-political and cultural topics, aiming to inspire aesthetic and theoretical engagement with diversity and cultural difference. At the heart of the festival are in-depth film discussions between the audience and the filmmakers or protagonists.
Young perspectives shape the Students’ Platform. The overwhelming response to the Call for Entries promises a rich program that is right on the pulse of the times. With the focus „Resounding Resistance,” the festival will particularly honor works that have emerged under the complex conditions of threat, violence, and displacement.
The Ateliers Varan [2], co-initiated by Jean Rouch in Paris, have been organizing documentary film workshops worldwide since the early 1980s. In the main program, the Filmforum will present a characteristic selection of films produced in the „Ateliers” ? simultaneously in Freiburg and at the Tashkent Film School [3] in Uzbekistan.
For all early birds, there is a discounted ticket available for ?55 [4] until mid-February! You can find information regarding accommodations, travel, and tickets on our website under „Service”. We are happy to assist excursion groups in finding a place to sleep (mail to students@freiburger-filmforum.de). Stay updated on Instagram [5] and
Facebook [6].
Let’s make the cinema a vibrant place of encounter and exchange. We look forward to seeing you!
[1] https://www.freiburger-filmforum.de/en/home/
[2] https://www.ateliersvaran.com/en
[3] https://www.instagram.com/tashkentfilmschool/?hl=de
[4] https://www.freiburger-filmforum.de/en/service/tickets/
[5] https://www.instagram.com/freiburgerfilmforum/
[6] https://www.facebook.com/freiburgerfilmforum
Andreas Heinz: Das kolonialisierte Gehirn – Zum Verständnis psychischer Krankheit im historischen Wandel
Vortrag
Vortrag in Wien, Österreich
Andreas Heinz (Charité Berlin): Das kolonialisierte Gehirn – Zum Verständnis psychischer Krankheit im historischen Wandel
Montag 2. Juni 2025, 18:00 Uhr
Josephinum – Historischer Hörsaal, Währinger Straße 25, 1090 Wien
Gibt es Zusammenhänge zwischen Vorstellungen über das Gehirn und den Kolonialismus? Konzepte psychischer Krankheit und Gesundheit stehen immer im jeweiligen historischen Kontext. Für das Verständnis psychischer Erkrankungen bedeutet dies, dass die um 1900 entwickelten Theorien auch koloniale, geschlechts- und altersbezogene Hierarchien auf das Gehirn und seine Funktionen projizierten. Psychische Erkrankungen wurden dementsprechend als evolutionärer Abbau, Degeneration oder Regression auf eine vermeintlich primitive Stufe verstanden, die angeblich bei den Bewohnern der Kolonien, aber auch bei Kindern und in manchen Theorien auch bei Frauen beobachtbar seien. Gegen diese Abwertung vermeintlich primitiver Verhaltensweisen erhebt sich eine Reihe kritischer Einwände, die von der Romantisierung bis zum strukturellen Vergleich unterschiedlicher Lebensweisen reichen, und die selbst wieder von den sozialen Bewegungen ihrer Zeit beeinflusst sind. Auseinandersetzungen um hierarchische Modelle psychischer Funktionsfähigkeiten und ihrer Verortung im Gehirn prägen bis heute das Verständnis psychischer Erkrankungen.
Andreas Heinz ist Senior Professor an der Universität Tübingen. Er studierte Medizin, Anthropologie und Philosophie an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Freien Universität Berlin und der Howard University, Washington, D.C. 2002 bis 2025 war er Direktor der Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie der Charité Campus Mitte. 2018 bis 2022 war er Sprecher des Sonderforschungsbereiches TR 265 sowie 2023 bis 2025 des Deutschen Zentrums für psychische Gesundheit. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Lernmechanismen bei Psychosen und Suchterkrankungen sowie Fragen der interkulturellen Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie.
*) Die Neuburger Lectures sind eine Vortragsreihe des Institutes für Ethik, Sammlungen und Geschichte der Medizin der Medizinischen Universität Wien und des Josephinums. Sie sind dem Neurologen, Medizinhistoriker und Gründer des Wiener Institutes für Medizingeschichte, Max Neuburger, gewidmet.
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)
At the borders of biomedicine: how health and care are reconfigured as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise
Panel
CfP for the STS Italia Conference
CfP panel „At the borders of biomedicine: how health and care are reconfigured as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise”
10th STS Italia Conference “Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring, and Reconfiguring”
Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
11–13 June 2025
Follow this link: https://stsitalia.org/submission-2025/ and submit a title, an abstract of up to 500 words, and keywords by 3 February 2025 (this deadline will NOT be extended).
At the borders of biomedicine: how health and care are reconfigured as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise
In contemporary societies, neoliberal economic arrangements and the rise of consumerism have significantly reshaped cultural expectations and representations of the body, framing health as a highly individualized and morally charged responsibility. Individuals are expected to seek knowledge, exercise moral judgment, participate in healthcare decisions, and minimize health risks through personal choices. This emphasis on personal responsibility is reflected not only in public health discourses but also in knowledge domains that sit at the epistemic boundaries of biomedicine. Consequently, it is important to explore how these new public health discourses have created space for alternative practices—such as meditation, nutritional therapies, dance therapy, and healing methods drawn from naturopathy and homeopathy—to enter the healthcare arena. These practices are supported by an increased emphasis on individual choice, therapeutic pluralism, and associated funding packages.
Approaches that encompass health and wellness practices that lie outside and are not accepted within biomedicine, otherwise labeled as “refused knowledge”, do not simply reflect an alleged opposition to biomedical advice stemming from health illiteracy or distrust of medical practitioners. Instead, they signify a demand from citizens, consumers, and patient advocacy groups to become more informed and accountable in their relationship with biomedicine. This trend involves “opening the black box” of biomedicine, critically assessing its inner workings. Further research is needed to explore how alternative knowledge systems challenge biomedical boundaries and contribute to shaping contemporary understandings of health and care.
This panel aims to bring together multidisciplinary STS research to deepen our understanding of the social and epistemic conditions under which health and care are discursively and materially enacted as “do-able problems” at the margins of biomedical science. It seeks to analyze the extent to which such enactment may reduce individuals’ reliance on prevailing medical practitioners by promoting activities such as self-care, health enhancement, chronic disease management, and the acquisition of diagnostic and therapeutic skills, thereby increasingly shifting medical expertise and responsibility to the individual.
We invite scholars and practitioners to submit theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological contributions that explore how forms of health and care emerging at the boundaries of science reshape biomedical authority while becoming entangled in contemporary politics of life.
We especially encourage a focus on the intersection of knowledge-making practices and individualization processes, and how these processes are enacted in relation to bodily experiences, health, and care management, particularly with regard to the emphasis on personal and moral responsibility for health.
Contributors may focus on the following dimensions:
• Analyze how health and care are practiced at the boundaries of biomedical sciences.
• Examine classification systems, technical objects, therapeutic practices, care relationships, self-experimental techniques, evidence production, and public communication strategies that either reinforce or challenge the narratives and normative stances framing health as an individualized moral responsibility and personal duty.
• Explore knowledge legitimization strategies employed to frame health and care as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise.
• Provide methodological reflections on the importance of maintaining a non-normative, symmetrical perspective when studying health and care practices beyond the biomedical, while also considering the researcher’s positionality in the field.
If you have any questions please email to stefano.crabu@unipd.it.
Caring for ‚care’: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI
Panel
Panel at STS Italia Conference
CFP for a panel on „Caring for ‚care’: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI”
Chair: Dr. Stevienna de Saille, Lecturer in Sociology
10th STS Italia Conference, taking place in Milan
11 to 13 June
Deadline for abstracts is 3 Feb 2025
You can find more information here: https://stsitalia.org/conference-2025
Caring for “care”: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and
AI
In some languages, such as Italian, there is a distinction between
caring for/caring about (cura) and providing health or social care
(assistenza). In other languages, particularly English, “care” can
become a catch-all encompasing the emotive, the transactional and the
systemic. This semiotic slippage, particularly in discussions about
emerging technologies such as robots and AI, means that things which
cannot actually care are increasingly touted as the
solution for “the crisis of care” for disabled and older people, ie.
those who advanced capitalist societies tend to care the least about.
Beginning with the work of Tronto and Bellacasa, this traditional open
panel asks how “care” becomes constructed, deconstructed, entangled,
detangled, implicated and alienated in these discussions in different
languages and different cultural contexts. It asks how those of us
doing empirical research on the use of robots and AI in care can
develop scholarship that uses feminist STS sensibilities, paradigms
and practices to inform our participation. How can the confluence of
the robotic, the human and the social be studied with care, when
neither the problems, context, purpose nor users are well defined and
the language of “care” is not universal? What other forms of
knowledge production could we utilize as an antidote to instrumental
engineering imaginaries, particularly where these claim to be solving
the “problem” of caring for societally vulnerable groups? How do we as
STS scholars work against technosolutionism, and avoid being co-opted
into instrumental imaginaries when working on interdisciplinary
projects? In other words, how do we care for “care”?
This panel invites papers which discuss these and similar questions
about mobilizing STS sensibilities to help transform and make visible
the care in care robotics, in ways which can shape
and influence the trajectory of engineering projects. We are
especially interested in qualitative empirical research that examines
the positionality and reflexivity of STS scholars with regard to the
study of “robots/AI for care”, as well as those examining the new and
experimental forms of normativity and relationality which are
beginning to arise around robots, AI and human engagement in this
field. Contributions may include (but are not limited to) those which
discuss “care” as:
- an ontological object, an ontology, an object conflict;
- an epistomology;
- a verb, an action;
- an ethics, a politics, a moral imperative, a normative orientation;
- a set of relations, a system;
- a metaphor;
- a synonym for maintenance, responsibility, nurturance…
- or any other way of approaching robots and AI in care as a topic for
(feminist) STS.
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
Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Konferenz
Hybrid Conference
CfP for the third ENPA (European Network for Psychological Anthropology) Biennial Conference titled “Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives”
Deadline February 21st
The conference will be held at the University of Münster in the west of Germany, as well as online
11–13 June 2025
Preceding the main conference, the Writing (Co-)Lab: ENPA Pre-Conference Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars will be held on 10 June 2025.
This year’s conference aims to explore the dynamic intersections between psychological anthropology and anthropological psychology, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. We invite anthropologists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines to present their research, share reflections, and envision future collaborations at the crossroads of these fields. The conference will host an array of international invited speakers including keynotes from Prof. Byron Good (Harvard University), Prof. Marie-Jo Delvecchio-Good (Harvard University), and Prof. Charissa Cheah (UMBC).
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.
In-person conference fees include warm lunch meals, snacks, coffee and tea. Prices are estimated at 90 euros for fully employed, 50 euros for not fully employed. Online participation will be around 30 Euros.
Find more info about the submission process: https://enpanthro.net/call-for-panels-papers-roundtables-and-labs/
Please send your submissions to: submissions@enpanthro.net.
If you have any questions regarding the conference, please do not hesitate to contact us at conference@enpanthro.net
At the borders of biomedicine: how health and care are reconfigured as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise
Panel
CfP for a conference in Milano, Italy
CfP for the panel „At the borders of biomedicine: how health and care are reconfigured as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise”
10th STS Italia Conference “Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring, and Reconfiguring”
Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
11–13 June 2025
Follow this link: https://stsitalia.org/submission-2025/ and submit a title, an abstract of up to 500 words, and keywords by 3 February 2025 (this deadline will NOT be extended).
Panel 25
At the borders of biomedicine: how health and care are reconfigured as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise
In contemporary societies, neoliberal economic arrangements and the rise of consumerism have significantly reshaped cultural expectations and representations of the body, framing health as a highly individualized and morally charged responsibility. Individuals are expected to seek knowledge, exercise moral judgment, participate in healthcare decisions, and minimize health risks through personal choices. This emphasis on personal responsibility is reflected not only in public health discourses but also in knowledge domains that sit at the epistemic boundaries of biomedicine. Consequently, it is important to explore how these new public health discourses have created space for alternative practices—such as meditation, nutritional therapies, dance therapy, and healing methods drawn from naturopathy and homeopathy—to enter the healthcare arena. These practices are supported by an increased emphasis on individual choice, therapeutic pluralism, and associated funding packages.
Approaches that encompass health and wellness practices that lie outside and are not accepted within biomedicine, otherwise labeled as “refused knowledge”, do not simply reflect an alleged opposition to biomedical advice stemming from health illiteracy or distrust of medical practitioners. Instead, they signify a demand from citizens, consumers, and patient advocacy groups to become more informed and accountable in their relationship with biomedicine. This trend involves “opening the black box” of biomedicine, critically assessing its inner workings. Further research is needed to explore how alternative knowledge systems challenge biomedical boundaries and contribute to shaping contemporary understandings of health and care.
This panel aims to bring together multidisciplinary STS research to deepen our understanding of the social and epistemic conditions under which health and care are discursively and materially enacted as “do-able problems” at the margins of biomedical science. It seeks to analyze the extent to which such enactment may reduce individuals’ reliance on prevailing medical practitioners by promoting activities such as self-care, health enhancement, chronic disease management, and the acquisition of diagnostic and therapeutic skills, thereby increasingly shifting medical expertise and responsibility to the individual.
We invite scholars and practitioners to submit theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological contributions that explore how forms of health and care emerging at the boundaries of science reshape biomedical authority while becoming entangled in contemporary politics of life.
We especially encourage a focus on the intersection of knowledge-making practices and individualization processes, and how these processes are enacted in relation to bodily experiences, health, and care management, particularly with regard to the emphasis on personal and moral responsibility for health.
Contributors may focus on the following dimensions:
• Analyze how health and care are practiced at the boundaries of biomedical sciences.
• Examine classification systems, technical objects, therapeutic practices, care relationships, self-experimental techniques, evidence production, and public communication strategies that either reinforce or challenge the narratives and normative stances framing health as an individualized moral responsibility and personal duty.
• Explore knowledge legitimization strategies employed to frame health and care as do-able problems beyond biomedical expertise.
• Provide methodological reflections on the importance of maintaining a non-normative, symmetrical perspective when studying health and care practices beyond the biomedical, while also considering the researcher’s positionality in the field.
If you have any questions please email to stefano.crabu@unipd.it.
Birth Rites Collection Summer School 2025
Workshop
University of Kent, UK and online
Birth Rites Collection Summer School
Birth Rites Collection Summer School 2025
The Summer School is a unique programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials around the Birth Rites Collection, the world’s first and only contemporary art collection dedicated to the subject of childbirth.This intensive programme will introduce you to the collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice, this year’s themes and the artworks.
The course is led by artist and BRC Curator, Helen Knowles and artist Dr. Leni Dothan, with guest lectures from leading artists in the field. The course will empower you to articulate your own practice and responses to the collection in a supportive environment whilst exploring critical perspectives in the field of birth.
Midwives, academics, curators, artists, medics, health professionals, art historians, policy advisors and the general public, who are interested in childbirth through the lens of art, are all welcome. As a participant, you will enter the course with your own skill set and finish, with bespoke visual, filmic and/or performative material, to be used thereafter in your own future work.
Workshops include exploring the ethical, political and visual discourses of birth via text, film, and performance. Additionally, this year, we present a unique opportunity to engage with a curated selection of works from the collection that are not ordinarily accessible to the public.
Themes include:
– Navigating mortality—from preterm birth to post-partum
– Artistic responses to preterm birth.
– How the collection informs and unpacks different perspectives in midwifery, medicine and education, and its potential to improve practice and policy.
– The Collection’s impact on feminist art practices and the rehabilitation of visual discourses of birth into art history.
– Censorship of artworks on birth, institutional responses, ethics and the law
Speakers include: Griselda Pollock (online keynote), Anna Perach, Hannah Conway, Courtney Conrad, Catherine Williamson, Andrea Khora, Helen Knowles and Leni Dothan, with more announced soon.
We offer two modalities for this course: one in person, as an intensive four-day program at the University of Kent, and one weekly online course over four weeks, that participants can join from anywhere in the world.
Four-day course (in-person):
Dates: July 7–10, 10–5pm BST (with some late evenings)
Location: University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom
Cost: £650 per person / £500 concession (for practicing artists, students, and those with a low income).
Capacity: 15 places per course
Accommodation: On-campus accommodation is available at an additional cost.
Four-week course (online):
Dates: Wednesdays, June 11– July 2, 7–9:30pm BST and Saturday, June 28, 2–5pm BST.
All lectures, workshops, and discussions will take place online.
Cost: £550 per person / £400 concession.
A £100 deposit is required to secure a place for either course.
To book your place visit: https://www.birthritescollection.org.uk/summer-school
Caring for ‚care’: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI
Panel
CFP for a panel at STS Italia Conference, Milan, Italy
CFP for a panel on „Caring for ‚care’: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI”
10th STS Italia Conference
11 to 13 June
Milan, Italy
Deadline for abstracts is 3 Feb 2025. You can find more information here: https://stsitalia.org/conference-2025/
Caring for “care”: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI
In some languages, such as Italian, there is a distinction between caring for/caring about (cura) and providing health or social care (assistenza). In other languages, particularly English, “care” can become a catch-all encompasing the emotive, the transactional and the systemic. This semiotic slippage, particularly in discussions about emerging technologies such as robots and AI, means that things which cannot actually care are increasingly touted as the solution for “the crisis of care” for disabled and older people, ie. those who advanced capitalist societies tend to care the least about.
Beginning with the work of Tronto and Bellacasa, this traditional open panel asks how “care” becomes constructed, deconstructed, entangled, detangled, implicated and alienated in these discussions in different languages and different cultural contexts. It asks how those of us doing empirical research on the use of robots and AI in care can develop scholarship that uses feminist STS sensibilities, paradigms and practices to inform our participation. How can the confluence of the robotic, the human and the social be studied with care, when neither the problems, context, purpose nor users are well defined and the language of “care” is not universal? What other forms of knowledge production could we utilize as an antidote to instrumental engineering imaginaries, particularly where these claim to be solving the “problem” of caring for societally vulnerable groups? How do we as STS scholars work against technosolutionism, and avoid being co-opted into instrumental imaginaries when working on interdisciplinary projects? In other words, how do we care for “care”?
This panel invites papers which discuss these and similar questions about mobilizing STS sensibilities to help transform and make visible the care in care robotics, in ways which can shape and influence the trajectory of engineering projects. We are especially interested in qualitative empirical research that examines the positionality and reflexivity of STS scholars with regard to the study of “robots/AI for care”, as well as those examining the new and experimental forms of normativity and relationality which are beginning to arise around robots, AI and human engagement in this field. Contributions may include (but are not limited to) those which discuss “care” as:
· an ontological object, an ontology, an object conflict;
· an epistomology;
· a verb, an action;
· an ethics, a politics, a moral imperative, a normative orientation;
· a set of relations, a system;
· a metaphor;
· a synonym for maintenance, responsibility, nurturance…
· or any other way of approaching robots and AI in care as a topic for (feminist) STS.
Chronic Care Technologies In and out of the Clinic: Tensions, Transformations, and Transgressions,
Panel
Panel at NordicSTS Conference in Stockholm, Sweden
Panel: “Chronic Care Technologies In and out of the Clinic: Tensions, Transformations, and Transgressions,”
2025 NordicSTS Conference in Stockholm
11–13 June
The CfA is now open, and the deadline is March 1st.
Our panel, “Chronic Care Technologies In and out of the Clinic: Tensions, Transformations, and Transgressions,” explores how digital technologies are shaping the organisation and experience of chronic care—sometimes in expected ways, but often in ways that create new tensions, demands, and possibilities.
From self-tracking wearables and predictive algorithms to electronic health records and decision support tools, digital infrastructures are increasingly woven into chronic care. But what does this mean for patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals? How do these technologies manage, standardise, or disrupt chronicity? And where do negotiation, resistance, and improvisation emerge?
We’re looking for contributions that engage with these questions from STS, anthropology, sociology, and related fields—whether through empirical studies, conceptual reflections, or methodological perspectives. Topics might include:
📌 Temporalities of chronic care (e.g., managing fluctuating symptoms vs. standardised digital timelines)
📌 Datafication of chronicity (self-tracking, patient-reported outcomes, medical records)
📌 Clinical decision support and its role in organising chronic care
📌 The tension between unpredictability and standardisation in chronic illness care
📌 The maintenance work needed in to keep digital care infrastructures functioning
📌 Access, inclusion, and exclusion in digitally mediated chronic care
The call for abstracts is now open, and we would love to see your work in this discussion! The deadline is March 1st. Abstracts can be submitted via [https://www.nordicsts.se/call-for-abstracts/], where you can also read the full panel description.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions and do share this with others in your network who might be interested.
Henriette Langstrup (KU), Benjamin Lipp (DTU), Amelie Lange (DTU, amela@dtu.dk)
On Tinkering with Bodily Waste and Care
Panel
CfP to a panel at an STS-Conference in Stokholm
CfP to the panel „On Tinkering with Bodily Waste and Care”
7th Nordic STS Conference: STS in and out of the Laboratory
11–13 June 2025
Stockholm
Organizers:
Malissa Kay Shaw, University of Health Sciences & Pharmacy in St. Louis
Liwen Shih, Taipei Medical University
Submission link: https://www.nordicsts.se/call-for-abstracts/
Deadline: March 1st
Title max 150 characters and Abstract max 250 words.
Abstract:
“Why did care become an object of concern and what is it about care that warrants being studied and attended to in social science writing. This question cannot be answered by pointing to bare facts, but has to do with values.” (Mol et al. 2010:9)
“What is happening when we imagine otherwise worthless, even dangerous, human wastes as informative and valuable viral sentinels?” (Anderson 2024)
Waste is traditionally something unwanted, or useless, that should be discarded—intrinsically defined in relation to things perceived as valuable or productive. Theorizations of waste often draw on Douglas’ (1984) framing of “dirt as matter out of place,” a means to explore social categorizations of polluting, taboo, and dangerous substances. This is useful when considering bodily wastes (substances commonly imbued with disgust and repulsion), especially when outside the body where they are “out of place,” which negates their potential capacities to be reimagined as valuable/useful.
Similar to other forms of waste, bodily wastes pose symbolic and material consequences, particularly in the embodiment of their social disgust, and their containment or disposal. How we care for bodily waste—both symbolically and materially—affects present and future individuals, networks of human and nonhuman actors, the environment, and multispecies generational collectives. This panel proposes engaging with the notion of care to reimagine bodily waste and its alternative relational influences.
STS approaches, inspired by Celia Roberts, Annemarie Mol, and María Puig de la Bellacasa, frame care as collective, distributed practices that involve dynamic interactions between humans, nonhuman actors, and technologies. Care is neither static or tentative, but continual, sustained enactments that shape current and future worlds. By attending to the ways care is enacted through embodied, relational, and material processes, STS scholarship helps uncover the tensions, inequalities, and continual consequences embedded in care practices. Drawing on this, our panel aims to use care to mediate waste as an actor within various contexts and speculate on its value and lack thereof. Similar to waste, what is cared for and what is not, corresponds with what is valued and de-valued, and these values are passed onto and shape future humans and non-humans alike (Fredengren and Åsberg 2020:57).
We invite scholars to use care to speculate on the value of bodily waste in diverse contexts. This may entail asking: what is the relationality of bodily waste; how may new technoscientific, biosocial, or political economic practices transform what waste is and can do. Our own research in the realm of reproductive health offers examples. For instance, when constituting the uterine lining, menstrual substance is useful, contributing to embryo development. But when expelled from the body, menstrual fluid is “dirty,” requiring discreet hygiene practices in many cultures. Symbolisms of menstrual filth shape these practices and acceptable menstrual products, curtailing the suitability of reusable products and creating additional waste that impacts the environment and future interspecies generations. Menstrual “filth” symbolism limits technoscientific ventures to reframe menstrual fluid as a biosensor— transforming “waste” into a valuable, informative substance. Miscarried embryos and aborted fetuses, once expelled from the body, are often similarly categorized as medical waste within biomedical systems. Those entangled with this “waste,” however, mourn an unborn child, or recognize a biosignificant substance that imparts knowledge of reproductive potential. In such remakings, what was previously deemed “waste” can become critical tools for advancing scientific inquiries in diagnostic techniques, stem cell research, developmental biology, or genetic studies. This shift highlights the relational nature of value, where the enactment of waste and non-waste is contingent on the “waste’s” context, capacity, and framing. Continuing to tinker with bodily wastes, of which there are many, and notions of care may offer a way to re-value “waste” and transform its engagement with more-than-human worlds, both present and future.
References
Anderson, Warwick (2024) Excremental hauntings, or the waste of modern bodies. Society for Social Studies of Science. https://4sonline.org/news_manager.php?page=37981.
Douglas, Mary (1984) Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge.
Fredengren, Christina and Åsberg, Cecilia (2020) Checking in with deep time: intragenerational care in registers of feminist posthumanities, the case of Gärstadsverken. In Deterritorializing the future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene, Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling (eds). Open Humanities Press, pp 56–95.
Mol, Annemarie, Moser, Ingunn, and Pols, Jeannette, eds (2010) Care: putting practice in theory. In Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. Transcript Publishing, pp 7‑25.
More information about the conference can be found here.
We look forward to receiving your submissions. If you have any questions or want to discuss paper ideas or presentation formats, please feel free to reach out to us!
Panel: Chronic Care Technologies In and out of the Clinic: Tensions, Transformations, and Transgressions
Panel
2025 NordicSTS Conference in Stockholm, Sweden
Panel on “Chronic Care Technologies In and out of the Clinic: Tensions, Transformations, and Transgressions”.
NordicSTS Conference in Stockholm, Sweden
11–13 June 2025
Deadline: 1 March
Details: Panel explores how digital technologies are shaping the organisation and experience of chronic care—sometimes in expected ways, but often in ways that create new tensions, demands, and possibilities.
From self-tracking wearables and predictive algorithms to electronic health records and decision support tools, digital infrastructures are increasingly woven into chronic care. But what does this mean for patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals? How do these technologies manage, standardise, or disrupt chronicity? And where do negotiation, resistance, and improvisation emerge?
We’re looking for contributions that engage with these questions from STS, anthropology, sociology, and related fields—whether through empirical studies, conceptual reflections, or methodological perspectives. Topics might include:
– Temporalities of chronic care (e.g., managing fluctuating symptoms vs. standardised digital timelines)
– Datafication of chronicity (self-tracking, patient-reported outcomes, medical records)
– Clinical decision support and its role in organising chronic care
– The tension between unpredictability and standardisation in chronic illness care
– The maintenance work needed in to keep digital care infrastructures functioning
– Access, inclusion, and exclusion in digitally mediated chronic care
The call for abstracts is now open, and we would love to see your work in this discussion! Abstracts can be submitted via https://www.nordicsts.se/call-for-abstracts/ , where you can also read the full panel description.
Re-ordering Care: Algorithmic Transformations of Medical Knowledge, Practice, and Governance
Konferenz
Panel at 10th STS Italia
Panel “Re-ordering Care: Algorithmic Transformations of Medical Knowledge, Practice, and Governance”
10th STS Italia – The Italian Society for Social Studies of Science and Technology: ‘Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring, and Reconfiguring’
Milan, 11–13 June, 2025
We invite contributions that explore shifts and transformations of care practices brought on by algorithmic technologies. We welcome presentations that explore algorithmic deployment in relation (but not limited) to the following themes:
• epistemic transformations in medical knowledge and practices;
• ethical re-arrangements in care practices;
• re-organizations of work and labor relations in healthcare contexts;
• re-organizations of clinical spaces and temporalities;
• shifts and tensions within and across informational health infrastructures;
• transformations of notions of risk and medical liability upon the employment of algorithmic systems in clinical practice.
Our panel aims to gather both empirical and theoretical analyses of the employment of algorithmic systems in the health service management and diagnostic decision-making, including the surrounding challenges, negotiations, conflicts, and frictions.
Abstracts (max 500 words) can be submitted to the conference platform through the “Submissions” page (panel 54). Please note that the deadline for submissions is February 3, 2025.
European Conference on Social Medicine
Konferenz
CfP for a Conference in Oslo
CfP for European Conference on Social Medicine
20th-22nd of June
University of Oslo
Call for papers deadline is the 7th of February
Call for papers:
Approaches to health and healthcare have long been at the heart of debates on the nature and practice of flourishing societies. Today, much of what has been held as widely shared truth is facing renewed backlash and constriction. A continuing onslaught of perceived and experienced crises has marginalized discourses of solidarity to the benefit of individualized and nationalized rhetoric on health. Scholars ask whether systems, knowledge, and research put in place to secure health and wellbeing might rather do the opposite. Social medicine as a field in Europe has struggled to find solid ground upon which to engage these critiques and go about the collective work of building healthier futures. Yet, in the face of fascist, xenophobic, and otherwise exclusionary victories across Europe and the US, social medicine is as vital as ever before.
To find a path forward for a social medicine with an eye toward health for all requires practice, theory, and action that transcends traditional disciplines and approaches. The humanities and social sciences provide frameworks for questioning, analyzing, and theorizing issues affecting societies, health, and wellbeing today. Health professionals trained in the humanities and social sciences may have unique perspectives on these questions in their own fields. We seek to bring to the fore three central modes of the work of social medicine – practice, theory, and action – to ask how they, either independently or in interplay, serve the building of alternative futures. By practice, we mean approaches to working in healthcare professions in ways that uphold the values of equity and justice, as well as situated, reflexive research engagements with healthcare practices. By theory, we mean critical epistemologies and social theories that confront entrenched paradigms and construct new approaches to health. By action, we mean engagement with and critique of attempts – interventions, advocacy, and systemic shifts – to build healthful, nourishing futures. Cognizant that social medicine reflects on, analyzes, and requires all three, we ask how and when these modes best may be interwoven.
The ECSM will be an arena for health professionals with dual training in the social sciences or humanities whose work engages one or all of these three modes: practice, theory, and action. Scholars across disciplines committed to nurturing health for all are also welcome. We seek to ground our conference in the shared purpose of building healthy futures and invite contributions that approach practice, theory, and action with curiosity. In coming together, we hope to create a community of scholars who strive to address the interconnected challenges that our collective health and health systems face as well as suggest solutions and initiatives by calling upon methods from the health professions, social sciences, and the humanities.
We invite submissions on any topic at the cross-section of the health professions and social science and the humanities, and welcome a range of disciplinary approaches, time periods and geographical contexts. We particularly encourage proposals that address aspects of the conference theme – practice, theory, and action – in the work of contemporary social medicine. Abstracts are welcome from all fields in the health professions, social sciences, and humanities, including inter- and trans-disciplinary projects.
Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have questions regarding the call or our conference more generally.
Emma Lengle MD MPH
Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo
Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard University
emmajle@uio.no / emma_lengle@hms.harvard.edu
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”
Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability
Panel
CfP for a Conference on Ethnography and Qualitative Research in Trento (Italy)
CfP „Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability”
10th International Conference on Ethnography and Qualitative Research Trento, Italy
July 10 to 12, 2025
Deadline: 20 January
„Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability”
Nowadays, there has been a «discursive explosion» 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?
Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability
Panel
CfP for an international conference
Call for papers for „Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability”
10th International Conference on Ethnography and Qualitative Research
July 10 to 12, 2025
Deadline January 25th
33. Ethnographies of expert knowledges in mental health, neurodivergence, and disability.
Nowadays, there has been a «discursive explosion» 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?
For any issues, don’t hesitate to contact the convenors at fabio.bertoni@ics.ulisboa.pt and luca.sterchele@unito.it.
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.
Towards new alternatives in social care: Transitions in the domestic, institutional and community care scenarios
Panel
CfP for Panel at 9th APA, Viana do Castelo (Portugal)
CfP for panel on the topic „Towards new alternatives in social care: Transitions in the domestic, institutional and community care scenarios”
9th APA – Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia
Viana do Castelo (Portugal)
14–18 July, 2025
Deadline 13 January 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.
Special issue on the topic „Sociotechnical imaginaries and practices of artificial intelligence in healthcare: revolutionising care or amplifying new risks?”
Call for Papers
CfP for a journal
CfP for the special issue „Sociotechnical imaginaries and practices of artificial intelligence in healthcare: revolutionising care or amplifying new risks?” in the Health Risk and Society, co-edited by Veronica Moretti and Francesco Miele.
We welcome contributions that critically explore the dual nature of artificial intelligence (AI): as a tool for innovation and as a system deeply embedded within complex social, technical, and ethical infrastructures. This special issue aims to balance the promise of AI with a critical examination of its risks, limitations, and potential vulnerabilities in healthcare contexts.
The full call for abstracts is attached. To participate, please submit a 500–800 word abstract by February 3, 2025. Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers by July 21, 2025.
For any questions or inquiries, feel free to contact me at our institutional email: francesco.miele@dispes.units.it and veronica.moretti4@unibo.it
Ethnography for Healthcare Improvement Summer School
Konferenz
Summer School University of Leicester, UK
„Ethnography for Healthcare Improvement Summer School”
23rd-25th July, 2025
Leicester Tigers Rugby Club Events Centre in Leicester, UK.
This course is delivered by expert ethnographic researchers and practitioners from the Social Science, Applied Healthcare & Improvement Research (SAPPHIRE) Group at the University of Leicester.
This short course is designed for experienced researchers, methodology educators, and doctoral students to critically engage with the theory and practice of ethnography in healthcare settings. Over 3 days, you will learn more about the use of ethnography for healthcare improvement, from designing research to managing improvement and evaluation tensions, navigating different contexts, reaching audiences and influencing policy and practice. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to develop a network of fellow practitioners and researchers with shared methodological interests, work with experienced ethnographers as mentors, and join an international community of practice around ethnography for healthcare improvement. The cost of the 3 day course, including all education materials and activities, plus lunch and refreshments both days, is £1000. Transport to and from the venue and accommodation at is not included.
Registrations are strictly limited, and are now open at https://shop.le.ac.uk/product-catalogue/events-at-leicester/health-sciences/ethnography-for-health-care-improvement-summer-school-2025; bookings will close 20 June 2025. A waiting list will be maintained in the event of the course being over-subscribed. Please forward any questions to Jennifer Creese, course lead: jennifer.creese@leicester.ac.uk.
Best wishes, Dr Jennifer Creese (BA, MIM, PhD, AFHEA)
Lecturer, Department of Health Sciences (SAPPHIRE Group)
College of Life Sciences
University of Leicester
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).
CfP for the conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science 2025
Konferenz
CfP for a STS conference in Seattle
CfP for the panel at the next conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science 2025
Seattle
3–7 September
‘Temporalities of bodies, technologies and their entanglements in the experience of disability and/or chronic illness’.
Chronic illness and disability have become a privileged place for technological intervention. Both are characterized by the deployment of technological devices that aim to mitigate, compensate for, or even prevent and slow down the loss of capacities, as well as alleviate or limit symptoms. In this context, a varied array of technologies that differently act on or intervene in bodies and places are introduced in people’s lives: technological devices that are implanted in the body (e.g. insulin pumps and deep brain stimulation), technological devices that are attached to the body (prostheses and orthoses) and/or technological devices that are connected both to the body and to a particular place (telecare and dialysis equipment; exoskeletons).
Regarding this ‘technological care’ (Lancelot & Guchet, 2023), research in STS and empirical philosophy of technology has mainly focused on technological use and appropriation, including the difficulties thereof. However vital and essential these technologies may be in sustaining people in daily life, attention has scarcely been paid to their fragility and people’s resulting vulnerability when they malfunction, wear and tear, break and/or thus can no longer be used or have to be adjusted and/or used differently (Oudshoorn, 2020).
These material and existential disruptions and constraints call for inquiring about the entanglements of different temporalities of chronic living and disability: of bodies adjusting to chronic illness, disability and/or to technological care; of the technologies themselves (from their development to their everyday use, adaptation, malfunctions and maintenance) and the socio-material infrastructures that support them; and of the relations between them. We invite contributions that address, empirically and/or conceptually, technological care and its temporalities.
Deadline of the call for abstracts:
- January 31, 2025
– Notification of acceptance:
– March 15, 2025
– 4S 2025 in-person conference:
– September 3–7, 2025
Abstracts (250 words max) should be submitted on the 4S website: https://bit.ly/3BtgXPh
Data, Care and Learning in Datafied Worlds
Panel
CfP for a hybrid conference
CfP for a panel on “Data, Care and Learning in Datafied Worlds”
4S conference in Seattle and online
3–7 September 2025
The extended deadline for abstract submissions is 2 February 2025. Please see below for more information and get in touch with any questions. Abstracts can be submitted here.
Short Abstract:
How do data, care, and learning shape each other? Bringing together empirical work and theoretical considerations across disciplines and contexts, this panel aims to think broadly about the practices that make up the dynamic data-care-learning nexus and the important questions they raise for STS.
Long Abstract:
In an era of digital transformation, how do data, care and learning practices mutually define each other?
As socially-situated and theory-laden phenomena, data practices are subject to operations of scaling and manipulation, underpinned by systems of logic and value, and co-produced with cultural, political, and socioeconomic realities. Data are a principal medium through which we come to learn, care, and know about our worlds.
Feminist STS has established the critical importance of care for sustaining our worlds, directing attention toward who cares, about what, and how. Continuing to critically theorize and empirically investigate care opens up questions of maintenance, vulnerability and interdependence. Tracing data practices with care in mind is likely to extend some of these insights and contest others.
Learning is theorised differently across fields from STS and Innovation Studies to Psychology and Education. Fundamental questions about the nature of learning underpin assumptions about knowledge, expertise, and pedagogy. What we care to learn about and how we learn to care have implications for our understanding of data practices since those practices both shape what can be learned and must themselves be learned.
Organised by the DARE team, this panel seeks to build on and contribute to these literatures by bringing together work across data technologies, contexts of use, intellectual fields, and communities of practice to examine the data-care-learning nexus.
Submissions might offer insights into, for example:
– What data, care, and learning come to mean through their mutual entanglement
– Where processes of learning and caring are located in data practices
– Distinguishing between caring, learning, and knowing in relation to data practices
– How data are cared for, and how data enable or constrain care
– What and how we learn through data practices
– How the nexus of data, care and learning are theorised across different sites, and with different publics
Neuromedical Configurations: Thinking Through Possibilities of Care, Neglect, and Solidarity
Panel
In Person Panel at 4S Seattle conference
“Neuromedical Configurations: Thinking Through Possibilities of Care, Neglect, and Solidarity”
4S Seattle conference
September 3–7, 2025
Seattle, Washington, USA
Submission deadline is *31 January 2025*.
Abstracts can be submitted using this link: https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php (Panel number 24).
Neuromedical Configurations: Thinking Through Possibilities of Care, Neglect, and Solidarity
Discussant:
Angela Marques Filipe, Durham University
Convenors:
Sebastian Rojas – Navarro, Andres Bello University, sebastian.rojas.n@unab.cl
Talia Fried, Ben Gurion University, frita@post.bgu.ac.il
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the ethico-political stakes, experiences and possibilities of neuromedical subjectivity. We welcome papers that explore pragmatic challenges and emancipatory potentials of neuromedical personhood, while theorizing with and beyond ‘care.’
Long Abstract:
Neuromedical knowledge and technologies are increasingly reshaping our understanding of human experience, fueling collective demands, transforming notions of personhood, and driving material, semiotic, and infrastructural changes across societies. While advancements in biomedical and psychological sciences have opened pathways for individual and collective action, healing, and support, these gains are unevenly distributed. Stigma, institutionalized indifference, and disparities in health resources persist globally, threatening to overshadow potential benefits. In this complex scenario, how does engaging with neuromedical advancements allow for the creation of diverse realities of care? How do forms of abandonment or solidarity shape the social spaces where health, illness, suffering, and disability are neuromedically configured?
This panel examines the ethico-political dimensions of neuromedical subjectivity by extending theories of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010). Building on studies of the relational, ethical, and political aspects of care, we invite researchers to explore frameworks that challenge and complement this notion, integrating STS perspectives on the (un)caring dimensions of neuromedical knowledge and practices with other critical lenses—such as “rights,” “solidarity,” “abandonment,” and “neglect” — and drawing insights from fields like medical sociology, disability studies, political philosophy, urban studies, posthumanism, critical neuroscience and others.
Presentations may address questions such as: How do care and neglect affect patient outcomes, identity formation, and experiences of social belonging within neuromedical contexts? How do neuromedical approaches shape practices and modes ofself-knowing, identity, and relationality across different social settings? How are the infrastructural, material, and semiotic aspects of our societies shifting—or not—to accommodate diverse neuromedical identities-in-the-making?
Please feel free to direct any questions to us at Talia Fried, frita@post.bgu.ac.il
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
“Shifting states and their histories in institutional care”
Panel
Hybrid Lecture
CfP for a panel on “Shifting states and their histories in institutional care”
Anthrostate conference “Shifting States”
22–24 October, 2025
Amsterdam, Netherlands
✨No registration fee, in-person only. (EASA network on Anthropologies of the State conference)
If the panel abstract below resonates with your research and you would like to join a bunch of friendly people, please send your abstract to Kristine Krause k.krause@uva.nl
The final panel including abstracts need to be submitted 11 April, so we would like have your abstract the latest 9th April.
Junior and PhD researchers particularly welcome.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Shifting states and their histories in institutional care
The anthropology of the state has long argued that states do not exist as coherent units out there but are articulated in practices, spaces and effects. One of the key spaces in which states have effects on their citizens are care institutions. They respond to crucial needs of humans; for instance as places where sicknesses are treated and frail bodies are taken care of. They can also curate major transitions such as birth and death. Care institutions such as hospitals or nursing homes are places defined by particular and persistent forms of interaction. These forms – where and how things are done, when and by whom – have often coagulated over time. They are backed up by legitimations which are not easy to question, because they are part of other non-tangible societal institutions, such as gendered division of labour, kinship and family ideologies which are specific to historically grown care and health regimes. These regimes as part of state governance can bear traces of pasts such as colonial rule, political regimes shifts or specific biopolitical projects of care and control. Institutional care can also be provided by non-state actors on behalf of the state including non-profit, religious or charity organisations but also commercial or even corporatized actors. The reasons why these actors perform or have taken over these tasks, have again their own histories often related to shifts in ways of governance of welfare state regimes.
This panel brings together papers that explore how shifting states and their histories come back resurface, or take unexpected forms within the spaces and practices of institutional care. The papers examine how historical legacies shape and haunt caregiving interactions, institutional routines, and the narratives and positionalities of those involved in these care settings. In asking how these pasts are articulated, linger on or are represented in care institutions this panel understands history not as something waiting to be discovered in the background, but as actively brought up, mobilized and presented in the field or articulated by the ethnographer. The past then becomes “history” through practices of actors in the field or through the analytical work of the ethnographer who identifies history as an absent presence in the studied situation or practice. The paper in this panel interrogate the constitutive moments where history appears, or is brought up in institutional care settings, asking, which positionings, generational memories and narratives become articulated therein.
Organized by the ReloCare Team & friends from the University of Amsterdam
(Mariusz Sapieha, Matouš Jelínek, Veronika Prieler, Shahana Siddiqui , Yuan Yan and Kristine Krause)
Anthropological Perspectives on Well-being
Konferenz
Call for Papers for the World Anthropological Union (WAU) 2025 Congress (hybrid)
As part of the „Ageing and Lifecourse” IUAES affiliation, we are pleased to announce that the Call for Papers for the World Anthropological Union (WAU) 2025 Congress is now open! The Congress will take place in a hybrid format—both onsite in Antigua, Guatemala, and online—from November 3–8, 2025. More info here: https://www.waucongress2025.org/call-for-papers/
Anthropological Perspectives on Well-being (Track 13)
Both quality of life and people’s ability to contribute towards meaning and purpose in everyday life are essential in understanding well-being (WHO, 2021). Nonetheless, it has primarily been approached through a biomedical lens, foregrounding physical health and disease prevention. Although there is a growing recognition of the psychological and social aspects of well-being (and, by that extension, health), these aspects remain undermined. At the same time, there have been numerous shifts and continuities with increasing health inequalities in global health governance and health-related knowledge production experienced across the life course. For instance, well-being is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, leisure activities, and consumer markets. To emphasise the deeply embedded nature of well-being and health in cultural, political, and historical contexts, there is a desperate need to probe newer approaches to holistic social and cultural determinants of health and the overall well-being of individuals and populations.
This panel aims to critically engage with medical pluralism, structural inequalities, caregiving practices, and new infrastructures catered to well-being, and biopolitical dimensions of well-being and health. We invite papers that focus on the lived experiences of illness, caregiving, ethical dilemmas in medicine and digital technologies, and the role of the state and markets in shaping well-being and health in contemporary societies. By bringing together scholars working broadly in (but not limited to) Medical Anthropology, this panel aims to foster discussions on how medical cultures, the technological turn, and capital flows shape overall well-being and health outcomes, influence caregiving and create new realities. Overall, we are interested in the intersection of medical anthropology, medical systems and political economy, especially concerning populations in the margins (e.g. ageing populations, disabled bodies, indigenous communities, and others).
This leads us to such important questions, like:
1. How do experiences (structural inequalities and caregiving responsibilities) throughout the life course shape meaning(s) and experience(s) of well-being?
2. Do global health policies reinforce or challenge existing health inequalities (especially in the wake of growing pandemics and epidemics) and their interaction with historical and political contexts in (re)defining medical pluralism?
3. How do digital technologies mediate the experience of well-being among marginalised sections? Does it contribute towards growing social inequalities in healthcare across the world?
4. How do non-medical spaces (leisure, community clubs, online groups) contribute towards improved health outcomes, and what policy implications do they hold for individuals across age groups and societies?
5. What could be the methodological possibilities for understanding lives in growing commodified and marketised ideals of well-being (well-ness industries, self-care markets)?
We look forward to bringing together ethnographic, historical and theoretical contributions from anthropology, sociology, public health, and allied disciplines. Papers addressing regional or transnational dynamics of health and medicine from the Global South are encouraged.
Rethinking health in the face of the biosocial challenges of the Capitalo/Anthropocene
Konferenz
Hybrid Panel
CfP for Panel „Rethinking health in the face of the biosocial challenges of the Capitalo/Anthropocene”
World Anthropological Union (WAU) Congress
November 3–8, 2025.
Antigua, Guatemala, and online
Submission Deadline: May 3, 2025
Panel: Rethinking health in the face of the biosocial challenges of the Capitalo/Anthropocene
Info: https://www.waucongress2025.org/panel/?id=315
World Anthropological Union (WAU) 2025 Congress – Unearthing Humanity: Critical and Urgent Epistemic Redefinitions in World Anthropologies
Panel Abstract
(Non-) human populations are intertwined with industrial substances with health impacts. Biophysicochemical transformations are accompanied by biopolitical processes that foster inequalities and psychosocial suffering, challenging the epistemic, ontological and ethical premises of anthropology. How does the anthropocene/capitalocene rethink studies from medical anthropology and how does this subdiscipline question and/or interpret the current epoch?
Konferenz
Fachtagung im Museum Relígio in Telgte, Deutschland
Call for Papers für die interdisziplinäre Fachtagung „Heil und Heilung. Zwischen Theologie, Popularfrömmigkeit und Medizin”
Die Kommission für Religiosität und Spiritualität in der DGEVW veranstaltet die Tagung in Kooperation mit der Evangelischen Erwachsenenbildung Münster und dem Museum Relígio in Telgte. Sie wird vom 20. bis 22. November 2025 im Museum Relígio in Telgte stattfinden.
Der Aufruf richtet sich sowohl an etablierte an Wissenschaftler*innen als auch an den akademischen Nachwuchs aus Forschung und Kulturinstitutionen. Da alle Beiträge der Tagung in einem Sammelband publiziert werden, sollen insbesondere neue oder diskussionswürdige Forschungsergebnisse präsentiert werden. Kurze Abstracts vom maximal 5.000 Zeichen mit einer Kurzvita senden Sie bitte bis zum 11. Mai an folgende Adresse : Heike.Plass@ev-kirchenkreis-muenster.de oder anja.schoene@telgte.de. Die Auswahl wird bis zum 30. Mai 2025 getroffen.
Die Corona-Pandemie hat Vorstellungen von Krankheit als Sünde oder Strafe hervorgerufen, die spätestens seit der Mitte des 20. Jahrhundert als theologisch überholt gelten. Im Domradio wurde 2020 gefragt: Gibt es eine religiöse Dimension von Krankheiten? Peter Schallenberg, Professor für Moraltheologie an der Theologischen Fakultät Paderborn, antwortete: „Wir würden heute sagen: Krankheit und Leiden sind keine Sündenstrafen, sondern sind Ereignisse, die zum naturwissenschaftlichen Bereich des Menschen und unserer Welt gehören (…).“ Nichtsdestotrotz pilgern etwa 6 Millionen Menschen jährlich nach Lourdes, viele um das wundertätige Heilwasser zu trinken. Und der Besteller des Komikers Hape Kerkeling „Ich bin dann mal weg“ aus dem Jahr 2006 über seine Erfahrungen auf dem Jakobsweg nach Santiago de Compostela ist auf eine überwältigende Resonanz gestoßen. Offensichtlich sind viele Menschen auf der Suche nach Sinn und Heilung, die sie auch auf Pilgerreisen suchen. Es lohnt sich also, über die religiöse Dimension von Krankheit und Gesundheit zu diskutieren.
In der Bibel wird vielfach über Krankheiten und Heilungen berichtet. Über Jahrhunderte verfügte die Kirche über das Heilungsmonopol Gottes. Die Heilung erfolgte in der Regel durch religiöse Mittel wie Gebete, Gelübde oder Opfer. Die Entwicklung der modernen Medizin im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert führte dazu, dass die therapeutische Kompetenz, die vorher den Kirchen zugeschrieben wurde, nun durch die Medizin übernommen wurde. So wird Krankheit nicht mehr als Sünde und Strafe gedeutet. Vielmehr begleiten die Theologien heute die Medizin mit ethischen Leitgedanken, wenn es beispielsweise um Fragen der Sterbehilfe geht.
In der Volkskunde/Empirischen Kulturwissenschaft gehören Volksmedizin, medikale Alltagskultur und Frömmigkeitsgeschichte zum Kanon des Faches. Viele Museen verfügen über Sachzeugnisse zu Heil und Heilung und nicht zuletzt in Wallfahrtsmuseen spielt das Thema eine wichtige Rolle. Darüber hinaus sind in den letzten Jahren Forschungsprojekt zwischen Theologie und Medizin entstanden, die den heilenden Charakter von Spiritualität erforschen.
Die Tagung „Heil und Heilung. Zwischen Theologie, Popularfrömmigkeit und Medizin“ soll sich dem Thema aus theologischer, kulturwissenschaftlicher, medizinischer und psychologischer Perspektive nähern. Da die Tagung im Museum Relígio stattfindet, sind museologische oder objektbezogene Beiträge besonders erwünscht:
Mögliche Themen könnten sein:
Krankheit und Gesundheit aus theologischer Perspektive (christlich, jüdisch, muslimisch…)
Spiritualität als Ressource
Spiritual Care
Self-Care-Praktiken
Wallfahrt und Pilgern
Wunderheilungen
Heilungsgottesdienste
Gesundbeter:innen, Geistheiler:innen
Magische Heilungspraktiken
Zusammenspiel von Theologie und Medizin am Lebensende
Votive und Anliegenbücher
Sachzeugnisse zu Heil und Heilung aus kulturgeschichtlichen Museen
Beschneidung aus medizinischer und religiöser Perspektive
Spirituelle Bedeutung von Tätowierungen