CFP: Bodies across borders: biosciences, technology and health
Session Organisers: Beth Greenhough (QMUL), Isabel Dyck QMUL)
Context:
This session seeks to explore the tensions and connections between three
contemporary areas of geographical concern: Firstly, there is the growing
literature in health geography which points to the need to address the
relationship between health and place and how these two combine to shape the
experience of disease. Secondly, geographies of migration and diaspora which
trace the complex trans-national networks that link different bodies and
their cultural, social and material components. Thirdly, there is the
attention currently being paid to the ways in which biotechnology and
biomedicine facilitates the re-organisation and re-distribution of people,
animals and their bodily components across space in increasingly diverse and
often disturbing ways. The session is aims to explore how health knowledges
and practices, medical and scientific expertise and labour, and the bodies
and bodily components upon which they act, move, circulate and are
re-distributed across the globe in ways which both reflect and challenge
dominant political, economic, social and cultural geographies.
Suggested Themes:
• The relationship between health and migration, including the migration of
healthcare workers and trans-national movements of medical knowledges and
traditions.
• Moves to seek new bodies across borders through medical tourism (cosmetic
surgery, hip replacements, reproductive tourism etc), the trade in body
parts (legal and illegal), and the trade in bodily commodities including DNA
and bio-informatic data for research.
• Moves and strategies which seek to contain particular kinds of bodies or
bodily components and the diseases they embody, including bio-security
measures.
• The geopolitics of diseases and epidemics.
• The global biomedical research and pharmaceutical industries and their
impact upon local experiences of health and disease.
• The way in which health and illness serve to restrict the movement of
bodies (e.g. through quarantine or the restrictions imposed on a body
through chronic illness, mental illness, etc.).
Proposed papers in the form of a title and short abstract (250 words
maximum) should be submitted to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
by 10th October 2007.
Further details on the paper requirements and registration for the AAG
meeting are at
http://aag.org/annualmeetings/2008/index.htm
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