Dear Colleagues,
Please consider submitting a paper to this
panel, which explores the mediation between different scales and their
connection to ontological multiplicity at the IUAES Inter-Congress 2015:
Re-Imagining Anthropological and Sociological Boundaries, in Bangkok,
Thailand, on 15 - 17 July 2015. The deadline for submissions of
abstracts is the 15th of February -
http://socanth.tu.ac.th/iuaes2015/call-for-papers/.
http://socanth.tu.ac.th/iuaes2015/2014/10/p8-04-from-the-microscipic-to-the-global-scaling-in-medical-science-and-technology/
P8-04 From the Microscopic to the Global: Scaling in Medical Science and
Technology
Conveners:
Coll Hutchison (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Gergely Mohacsi (Osaka Unversity)
Wakana Suzuki (Osaka University)
Medical sciences, technologies and policies operate on different
qualitative and quantitative scales. To be able to claim, for example,
that a virus is a global health concern requires disjunction,
commensuration and boundary making on multiple levels and in multiple
locations. How such diverse objects hang together, then, is an open
ethnographic question that calls for open anthropological answers.
Through their focus on ‘scaling,’ the papers of this panel will attend
to the mediation between different ontological realms and will argue
that such mediation itself is generative of scale.
Scientific, political and cultural claims about size, volume,
difference and value emerge through their connections with daily
practices of scaling, such as culturing cells in a biology lab,
comparing medicinal herbs, or measuring a child’s growth. Scale-making
in this sense plays a central role in understanding the dynamic
interplay and crossover between laboratory, clinical and public health
settings. The central questions that orientate this panel are: How do we
as researchers engage simultaneously with different qualitative and
quantitative scales?; and what boundaries and concepts are drawn up or
contested in doing so?
Building on recent work in anthropology and science studies, we also
hope to bring new insights to the discussion about ontological
multiplicity. The ethnographically grounded accounts here point to the
coexistence of different realities—indigenous, embodied, scientific,
etc.—and the tensions between them by showing how multiplicity becomes a
matter of scaling in the day-to-day practices of medical innovation
and intervention from the microscopic to the global. Some papers will
highlight how different medical disciplines and conceptual boundaries
are realised and contested; others will trace the work of translation
across cells, bodies and populations.
This attention to the devices and material practices of scaling has
the potential to further problematise the division between macro and
micro levels of analysis in social research and to offer alternative
perspectives to seemingly irresistible categories of globalisation,
community, society and nature, among others. Such categories are
understood to be no longer singular, but conceptualised and enacted in
multiple ways. Furthermore, they are located on continuums rather than
as discrete categories.
Kind regards,
Gergely, Wakana and Coll
*************************************************************
* Anthropology-Matters Mailing List
* http://www.anthropologymatters.com *
* A postgraduate project comprising online journal, *
* online discussions, teaching and research resources *
* and international contacts directory. *
* To join this list or to look at the archived previous *
* messages visit: *
* http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML *
* If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all *
* those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: *
* [log in to unmask] *
* *
* Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new *
* CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com *
* an international directory of anthropology researchers
*
* To unsubscribe: please log on to jiscmail.ac.uk, and *
* go to the 'Subscriber's corner' page. *
*
***************************************************************
|