Assuming my apology for cross-posting is accepted, I'd like to draw
critical geographers' attention to the forthcoming
International Symposium in Medical Geography
http://www.attcanada.net/~geog2000/ which is taking place in
Montreal, in July. More specifically, however, I'd like to advertise
a session that a colleague and I hope to run at this conference.
Call for papers: Ninth International Symposium in Medical Geography,
July 3-7, 2000, Montreal
Session title: Recovering ‘new' geographies of health
Session abstract
The notion of ‘health' is a key conceptual marker for current work in
the so-called ‘postmedical geography of health'. This concern with the
meaning(s) of health has taken the discipline in a number of fruitful
directions ranging from health inequalities, to notions of individual
and cultural difference in the understanding and experience of
(ill)health and to the understanding of healthy or ‘therapeutic'
landscapes. At the root of much of this work is the unchallenged
position of health which, following Crawford (1980), we would suggest
has come to represent a "metaphor for all that is good in life".
Even as early as 1980, Crawford was drawing attention to some of the
implications of the turn towards health in general and of healthism
more specifically. In particular, Crawford highlighted the fact that a
greater range of social practices and behaviours were being placed
under a medical or healthist gaze — an idea that might be viewed
alongside Armstrong's (1995) "surveillance medicine" or Castel's
(1991) notion of the "risk factor". More recent inquiry, conducted
under the umbrella category of critical ‘new' public health, has
extended Crawford's initial thoughts and has sought to explore in more
detail the relationships between health as a dominant cultural motif
and notions of risk, consumption, identity and governance.
Therefore, in this session we aim to subject geographical
understandings of health to a more critical reading which will draw on
ideas generated by the critical ‘new' public health literature -
Lupton (1995), Armstrong (1995), Petersen (1996), Petersen and Lupton
(1996), Nettleton and Bunton (1995). This, we believe, is of
particular importance because of the ways in which this work overlaps
with core geographical ideas. For example, it questions how space,
place and the environment are used in the discourses of the ‘new'
public health; it explores how the spaces of our everyday lives have
been territorialised by questions of health and how ‘sick spaces' have
been replaced or subsumed; and it challenges the exclusionary nature
of contemporary discourses that seek to generate normative beliefs
surrounding the healthy body.
Contact: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] for further
details of the session by March 31st
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