Thinking through impact: ethnographic approaches
Panel
Panel at the Annual Meeting of the Swiss Anthropological Association.
„Thinking through impact: ethnographic approaches”
Conference Towards an anthropology for troubled times?
Lucerne
June 6–8, 2024.
Submissions will be open until February, 15.
We invite you to submit an abstract to our open panel „Thinking through impact: ethnographic approaches”. We welcome both traditional and multimodal presentations from all disciplines and practices. For more details on how to submit, please visit our webpage:
If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact any one of us!
Fiona Gedeon Achi: fiona.gedeon-achi@u‑bordeaux.fr
Sandra Bärnreuther: sandra.baernreuther@unilu.ch
Ben Eyre: ben.eyre@uea.ac.uk
Beyond Polarisation: Approaches to vaccination
Panel
Panel at conference EASST-4S 2024 „Making and Doing Transformations”.
„Beyond Polarisation: Approaches to vaccination”
16–19 July 2024
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Convenors: Lesley Branagan (Hamburg University), Anna Dowrick (University of Oxford), Rebecca Cassidy (University of Kent), Simon Bailey (University of Kent)
Please submit your proposal here
CfP deadline: February 12 2024
Short Abstract:
Covid’s threat to modern reasoning and subsequent divisions are located in policies, discourses and experiences of vaccines, polarised into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ sentiment. We consider the interplay between the promises of vaccines, unexpected vaccine experiences, and Covid’s threat to rational order.
Long Abstract:
The Covid pandemic brought significant transformations in the technologies, roles, governance, discourses and meanings of vaccines.
The technological and political promise of Covid vaccines has left limited space for exploration of their unintended consequences. Dramatic polarisations of ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ sentiments result in disbelief, silencing, and exploitation of unexpected experiences connected to vaccination, particularly in the context of vaccine injury. Similarly, desire to re-purpose vaccines for other uses, such as treatments for Long Covid, has met resistance.
In these responses we find a paradoxical refusal to consider the spaces and ‘residual categories’ (Bowker & Star, 2000) between pro- and anti-vaccination, and limited engagement in the multiplicity of what vaccines ‘do’. However, histories of changing uses of vaccines as technologies, vaccine injuries and medical-legal reform also show that there are potential sites for contesting these polarised categories (Kirkland, 2016).
We encourage explorations of the broader relations between the threat of Covid and the subsequent failures of reflexivity related to ‘unexpected reactions’ to, with, and about vaccines.
Paper proposals could consider:
The effects of complexity and uncertainty upon polarisation, and the paradoxical ‘hardening’ of both lay and professional perspectives on unexpected vaccine reactions;
The temporalities and futurism at play in promises concerning the unknowable (Beckert, 2016), and the consequent misdirection of vaccine expectations and resources;
The interplay of polarising categories of risk and threat, trust and mis-trust, and the possibilities for nuanced understandings of agency and vaccine hesitancy;
The ‘distribution of belief and unbelief’ (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982) represented by polarised vaccine discourses, and the positioning of different interests (scientific, professional, governmental);
Contestations of categorisations, through advocacy, or ‘citizenship work’ (Petryna, 2004) and the role of narrative in mediating between the ‘counter-factual and factual’ (Maier, 2004) in the context of unexpected events.
CfP MedAnthro panels at EASST/4S (16 – 19 July 2024, Amsterdam)
Panel
MedAnthro panels at EASST/4S (16 – 19 July 2024, Amsterdam)/CfP
CfP MedAnthro panels at EASST/4S Conference (16–19 July 2024, Amsterdam)
STS congress on „Making and doing transformations”
Deadline for CfP: 12 Feb 2024
Details here
MedAnthro Panels:
– MAYS Panel: The Dynamic Landscape of Medical Anthropology: Scientific Expertise and Public Engagement in the Transformation of Disciplinary Boundaries
Healthcare Transformations:
– Haptic Revolutions: Sensory Futures and Phenomenologies of Expertise in Medical Worlds
– Doing Diversity: Difference, Equity and Inclusion in Biomedical Research
– Making and Doing Just Infrastructures in Healthcare
– Theorizing through the mundane: storying transformations in healthcare
Healtcare and Technology-induced change:
– Health Knowledge in Society: Biomedical Expertise, Technologies, Inclusion and Inequality
– The technopolitics of (health)care: Transforming care in more-than-human worlds
– Social exclusion in the digital age – Exploring inequities in the utilisation and accessibility of eHealth technologies
– Entanglements of STS and Bioethics: New Approaches to the Governance of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Health
– Making and (un)doing digital health and welfare transformations: Normative tensions and action repertoires of embedded STS researchers
– Sociotechnical transformations of health care: Practices of objectivations, knowledge translation and new forms of agency
Health and Data
– Anti-Racist Approaches to Health Information Technology
– Data on the move: the politics of cross-border health data infrastructures
– Corporeal Quantification: Numerical Negotiations of Health and the Body
Biomedical in a Critical Study:
– Governing biomedical tests: Towards Social Studies of Bio-Medical Testing?
– Probing Openness in Biomedical Platforms: Global Health meets Open Science
– Critical and/or creative approaches to bodily data and the management of health risks
– Public Participation and Health Equality in Future Biobanking
CAM:
– STS approaches to study contestations of medical evidence-based knowledge and recommendations
Methodology and Research Practice:
– How to research medical AI?
– Issues of Scale: The global and the local in health research projects with a worldwide context
Chemical Affects: Engaging Substances in Life-Death Worlds (EASST-4S Conference, Amsterdam)
Panel
CfP „Chemical Affects: Engaging Substances in Life-Death Worlds” (P041), for the upcoming EASST-4S Conference in Amsterdam (16–19 July 2023).
CfP „Chemical Affects: Engaging Substances in Life-Death Worlds” (P041)
EASST-4S Conference, Amsterdam
16–19 July 2023
CfP deadline: February 12 2024 (submit your paper here)
Abstract:
Chemicals are ambivalent matters, engaged in the distribution of life and death across geographies, organisms, and bodies. As industrial products they carry the history of capitalist and environmental exploitation. As effective substances they foster growth and pleasure, produce kinship and belonging, or induce harm and suffering. As enduring particles they shape our geological era, while unequally exposing people to toxicants along the geopolitical lines of class and race (Agard-Jones 2013).
Industrial chemicals and their by-products have become indispensable to human and more-than-human life, acting on and transforming territories and bodies in ways that are destructive and beneficial to planetary and human health. In this current condition of alterlife (Murphy 2017), the histories of chemicals, their (side) effects as well as their afterlives and speculative futures permeate life-death affectively and materially. As such, STS scholars follow chemicals ethnographically (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017) and take into account their agency, by allowing substances to surprise and enthrall (Dumit 2022, Gomart 2004).
This panel gathers scholars working on and with substances in different disciplines and localities to explore the politics, ethics and affects of living and dying in relation to chemicals. It expands existing discussions with a focus on how specific chemicals – pharmaceuticals, pesticides and other compounds – in their respective form, property and use are engaged in the production and governance of life and death, but also how they blur the lines between those worlds.
The Anthropology Matters network invites papers that:
- trace chemicals in their lively and deadly potentials and methodologically attune to their material-affective capacities.
- critically investigate practices of inhabiting toxic worlds (Nading 2020) as well as the post/colonial inequalities inscribed in them.
- explore avenues of collaboratively intervening in “chemical violence” (Murphy 2017) to strive for decolonial futures.
- question ethical imperatives of living and dying in chemically altered times.
Contact:
Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves (Freie Universität Berlin)
Max Schnepf (Freie Universität Berlin)
Giorgio Brocco (University of Vienna)
Transforming the study of cancer
Panel
Combined Format Open Panel P133 at conference EASST-4S 2024 Amsterdam: „Making and Doing Transformations”.
Transforming the study of cancer
16–19 July 2024
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Convernors: Violeta Argudo-Portal (Universitat de Barcelona), Masha Denisova
CfP deadline: February 12 2024
Please submit your proposal here
The study of cancer has gathered an extensive community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities, providing a more dense, heterogeneous, and diverse approach to this disease multiple. Science and technology scholars have taken an important role in this task by examining how knowledge about cancer is produced and with what consequences for researchers, practitioners, and patients. In this panel, we seek to make explicit the contributions of STS tools and sensibilities to the cancer study. STS toolkit becomes particularly helpful in discerning what logics, interests, and imaginaries are at play in the cancer research and care arena. The ever-increasing influence of pharmaceutical companies and investments in heavily technocratic forms of cancer care transform not only the forms of cancer diagnostics and treatment but also the experiences of those living with the disease. The growing attention to cell biology research and individualization of risk makes cancer research shift further from identifying other aetiologies of cancer, such as environmental and ecological links. These transformations collectively shape how cancer is known and lived with. For this panel, we invite empirical and theoretical submissions that revolve around the study of cancer, ranging from attention to high-tech technological and pharmaceutical endeavors to different forms of crafting care, knowledge, treatments, infrastructures, and knowledge. Works exploring carcinogenic leaks, cancer politics, and epistemic absences are particularly welcome.
The panel is convened by the Political Stakes of Cancer Network, an international group of social sciences and humanities scholars studying science, society, and power relationships in cancer across the globe. The panel will follow a combined format, including sessions with conventional paper presentations and an experimental session for which we encourage submissions based on multimodal materials (illustrations, short films, visual essays, experimental data visualizations, and more).
(Un)Knowing Harm: Localised Epistemic Responses to Global Environmental Degradation
Panel
CfP/Panel “(Un)Knowing Harm: Localised Epistemic Responses to Global Environmental Degradation” at EASA2024: Doing and Undoing with Anthropology (Barcelona, 23–26 July 2024)
“(Un)Knowing Harm: Localised Epistemic Responses to Global Environmental Degradation”
EASA2024: Doing and Undoing with Anthropology (Barcelona)
Date: 23–26 July 2024
The deadline for paper submissions is 22 January 2024. Please note that the panel will take place face-to-face.
Short Abstract:
The panel examines the techniques and technologies by which environmental damage and harm on the individual and the social body become known and unknown, voiced and silenced, manifested and repressed, thus shedding light onto the nexus of epistemic uncertainty and environmental injustice.
Long Abstract:
Capitalist extractivism, industrialism, militarism, and ongoing forms of colonialism leave the planet damaged. Be it the loss of habitats for human communities and other forms of life or the amounts of toxic contaminants that suffuse the environment, the very reality of environmental damage is often contested as it gets tangled in processes of knowing, unknowing, denial, disavowal, and ignorance. Powerful actors—state authorities, corporations, the military—all play a central role in such politics of (un)knowing by exercising monopolies on scientific and expert knowledge, thereby prescribing what ought to be known and unknown in order to protect their political, economic, and strategic interests. Civil society organisations, activist groups, and individuals often protest such epistemic and environmental injustices, fighting for greater transparency and access to knowledge. But what counts as knowledge is frequently disputed—even when it comes in the form of hard scientific evidence—not only by the vested interests of power, but also by those who bear the burden of environmental harm. For it is not uncommon for people and groups to harness practices of (un)knowing to deal with environmental degradation in ways that might allow them to escape stigmatisation, resist or refuse empowered constraints, or simply live lives that are more meaningful.
We invite ethnographically-rich papers that examine the techniques and technologies by which environmental damage and harm on the individual and the social body become known and unknown, voiced and silenced, manifested and repressed, thus shedding light onto the nexus of epistemic uncertainty and environmental injustice in late industrialism.
More info
Panel convenors:
Nikolaos Olma (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient – ZMO)
Rishabh Raghavan (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Biosocial Approaches to Health and Environment (EASA conference Barcelona 23–26 July 2024)
Panel
Invitation to contributions to the panel „Biosocial Approaches to Health and Environment” at the upcoming EASA conference in Barcelona (23–26 July 2024)
Panel „Biosocial Approaches to Health and Environment”
EASA conference in Barcelona
Date: 23–26 July 2024
CfP deadline: 22 January 2024.
Short Abstract:
This panel discusses how anthropologists can contribute to collaborative efforts in studying environmental impacts on (ill)health by complexifying ‘the social’ and asking how such collaborations might lead to more tractable targets for biosocially informed ecological health and policy interventions.
Long Abstract:
Increasingly, social determinants and material elements are being considered relevant forms of exposure that have direct impacts on environmental (ill)health (e.g. in exposome or urban mental health research). This reflects shifts in fields such as epidemiology in recognising how environmental conditions are not simply ‘residual’ or ‘confounding’ risk factors but in fact ‘over-arching determinants’ of (ill)health (Vineis 2022).
Yet measurements and definitions of ‘the social’ in such research are often conceptually simplistic, empirically thin and lack an understanding of the dynamic and situated interplay of socio-ecological variables (Manning 2019; Söderström n.d.). While epidemiological studies have identified high-level social variables (SES, ethnicity, population density) associated with (ill)health, ethnographic studies have shown how complex environmental conditions emerge and are dealt with in situated everyday life (Bister et al. 2016; Rose/Fitzgerald 2022).
There is an urgent need for more effective transdisciplinary engagement that can attend to complexity in examining the socio-environmental (Lappé/Hein 2020) where urban/rural/developing environments, climates and health are interacting but also considers how exactly collaboration can be part of ‘making better numbers’ (Roberts 2021)
In this panel, we will reflect on efforts by anthropologists to develop collaborative biosocial research relevant to examine the complex dynamics of health and environment. We will consider the conceptual and methodological contribution of anthropology in newly evolving biosocial epidemiologic/biomedical research on health and environments, what form of inter- and transdisciplinary approaches are required, and in what ways these might lead to more tractable targets for biosocially informed ecological health and policy interventions.
Convened by by Patrick Bieler Technical University of Munich (Technical University Miunich), Sahra Gibbon and Rosie Mathers (University College London)
More info here
Care models in transition: public policy challenges in response to the pandemic crisis
Panel
CfP Panel for EASA’s Online Panel „Care models in transition: public policy challenges in response to the pandemic crisis”
Online Panel „Care models in transition: public policy challenges in response to the pandemic crisis”
EASA conference
Barcelona, July 23–26, 2024.
Please submit your proposal here
Deadline: 22 January 2024.
Convenors:
Carlos Chirinos (Rovira i Virgili University, Spain)
Silvia Bofill-Poch (University of Barcelona, Spain)
Antónia Pedroso de Lima (ISCTE-IUL CRIA, Portugal)
Short abstract:
The COVID-19 crisis has shown the structural weaknesses of our care models. This panel encourages contributions to a critical debate on changes in public care policies in response to the pandemic crisis from an anthropological perspective.
Long Abstract:
The global COVID-19 pandemic brought into focus the effects of a long-lasting care crisis in Europe and beyond (Daly 2020). The COVID-19 crisis stretched our health and social protection systems to the limit, exacerbated already existing social inequalities and showed the structural weaknesses of our care models. Families, and paid care workers, had to cope with sudden difficulties, some of which were extremely complex to manage. Some citizens’ movements reacted and raised their voices for a fairer and more sustainable care model. Institutions also reacted. The urgency of a change of model became evident. In 2022, the European Commission approved the European Care Strategy, which is already guiding different governments’ programmes to change the care model. The Strategy states that this change is essential and must be accompanied by significant reforms and public investment. Accordingly, we are interested in contributions addressing: a) policy responses to the care crisis (or overlapping crises: financial, health, climate, etc.); b) the tensions –risks and potentials– that some of the suggested measures entail, such as deinstitutionalisation, person-centred care or the public-community care model; and c) the challenges involved in moving towards more comprehensive models of care, in terms of articulation between different agents of care, and in terms of policy articulation (care, health and housing policies, among others). All of this will be based on empirical research, which will enable the debate to be grounded and compared. This panel will contribute toward opening a critical debate on changes in public policies on care in the coming years from an anthropological perspective.
Challenging Global Health through a socio-anthropological lens
Panel
Cfp for Panel at 18th EASA Barcelona
Cfp for Panel
„Challenging Global Health through a socio-anthropological lens”
18th EASA Biennial Conference, 23–26 July 2024 (Barcelona)
Deadline: 22 January 2024
Short Abstract:
The pandemic revealed the inequities that structure the global health apparatus. This panel proposes a space for reflecting on the contributions of anthropology to the field of global health, as a discipline sensitive to nuanced understandings of health and key to critically assess health inequities
Long Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought age-old global health issues to the forefront of public debates, revealing the stark inequities that structure the global health apparatus. From an anthropological perspective, the field of global health is an area of research that links health to assemblages of complex and contingent global processes, contributing to analyses of health inequities and the social determinants of health. Hence, the pandemic has constituted an unprecedented opportunity for anthropological insights to (re)shape debates and practices around emerging topics and these classic (but unresolved) issues.
Building on concepts critical to understanding health and well-being (i.e. stigma, ethnicity, medicalisation) and driven by concerns over ‘glocal’ processes, sociocultural anthropology is uniquely positioned to advance progress in global health equity. Moreover, through key and well-known disciplinary approaches for methodological self-examination (i.e. positionality, reflexivity), anthropological practice is compelled to critically rethink global health scholarly inquiry. In the aftermath of a global pandemic, anthropological work in and of global health has never been more urgent.
We invite papers on the following broad themes:
(Mis)alignments between health priorities of local populations and those of the global health agenda
How global inequities in access to, and distribution of, medicines/treatments/vaccines unfold in local contexts
Critical analysis of emerging key concepts in global health discourse (eg. global health security, vaccine hesitancy)
Case studies exploring the role of local communities in addressing public health problems, Interdisciplinarity, methodological and ethical aspects of socio-anthropological research in, and of, global health
Convernors:
Cristina Enguita-Fernandez (Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal))
Yara Alonso (University of Agder)
Olga Cambaco (Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute)
Neusa Torres (University of Wits)
Please, consider joining us! The panel will take place on-site. You can submit your papers here.
Deadline: 22 January 2024
We look forward to receiving interesting and stimulating proposals!
Best wishes
Yara, Olga, Neusa & Cristina
Collaboration as method in Medical Anthropology. Feminist and decolonial perspectives
Panel
CfP for EASA’s Panel “Collaboration as method in Medical Anthropology. Feminist and decolonial perspectives”.
„Collaboration as method in Medical Anthropology. Feminist and decolonial perspectives”
EASA, Barcelona, 23–26 July 2024)
CfP Deadline:22 January 2024
More Info here
Short Abstract:
What is collaborative research in Medical Anthropology? How to have trusting and symmetrical relationships when addressing health-related inequalities and power relations? From a feminist and decolonial approach, we discuss the (im)possibilities of collaboration in Medical Anthropology research.
Long Abstract:
Over the past decades, Medical Anthropology has been reflecting on its methodological approaches, especially in contexts of marked inequality and power imbalance; as well as in contexts where our interlocutors’ survival and existence are at stake, and where they face suffering and devastation. How to do ethnographic research on conditions of suffering and inequality when addressing health-related issues without reproducing these conditions?
From a feminist and decolonial approach to research and knowledge practices, collaborative research figures as one possible way to counteract extractivist modes of fieldwork that feed into and perpetuate the long-lasting matrix of power. However, if we are to engage in ‘true’ collaboration, questions arise about the varied forms it may (and should) take. For instance, when does collaboration begin, and when and how does it end? How do different forms of knowledge enter into dialogue during fieldwork and become an integral part of the research findings? What can collaboration look like in the context of academic hierarchies, especially when it involves early-career researchers (including students)? How can ECRs with often low paid and short-term jobs engage in time- and resource-consuming collaboration without increasing their precarious status?
In this round-table, we plan to critically engage with collaborative methodologies which are ideally based on concrete ethnographic case studies. We aim to discuss and learn from the challenges of such methodologies that have the potential of decentering academic knowledge practices by giving equal room to diverse forms of knowledge production in matters of health, care, hope, body, life, and death.
Convenors:
Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lucia Mair (University of Vienna)
Chair:
Maria Fernanda Olarte-Sierra (University of Vienna)
Feel free to email if you have any questions!
Warm wishes on behalf of all convenors,
lucia.mair[at]univie.ac.at