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Immobility and Medicine:
Exploring Stillness, Emptiness and the In-Between
Edited by Cecilia Vindrola-Padros, Bruno Vindrola-Padros and Kyle Lee-Crossett
(University College London, London, UK)
The social sciences have experienced a “mobilities turn” in the last two decades, which critiqued fixed and sedentary notions of social life and drew attention to the constant flows of people, ideas, and objects that permeate our daily lives. This emerging field of thought proposed to study mobilities “in their own singularity, centrality and contingent determination” (D’Andrea et al. 2011:150), creating a new, dynamic, lens through which to (re)examine social thought and practice (Soderstrom et al. 2013: vi).
Mobility forms were considered as acting in dialectical relationship with the immobile, where flows of people, information or objects might be interrupted, fixed or suspended at specific time points (Hannam et al. 2007; Urry 2007). Recent work has highlighted the importance of thinking about a mobility/immobility continuum, where movement intersects with processes that might entail episodes of transition, waiting, emptiness, and fixity (Khan 2016). We believe that this focus on stillness, things that are stuck, incomplete or in a state of transition can point to new theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions in social studies of medicine.
Social studies of health, illness and medicine have drawn from the mobilities literature to explore the flows of people, patients, medical technologies, and healthcare workers through concepts such as healthscapes (Llewellyn et al. 2017), biotech pilgrimage (Song 2010), and mobilities of wellness (Masuda et al. 2017). Considerable work has been carried out on mobile technologies in healthcare delivery, mainly in the form of mhealth or virtual care, such as, telemedicine (Lupton 2018). A significant amount of attention has been placed on the study of mobility, but not always in relation to immobility (Vindrola-Padros et al. 2018).
In this edited volume, we will bring the concept of immobility to the forefront of social studies of medicine to answer the following questions:
* How does immobility shape processes of medical care?
* How is a continuum of mobility/immobility made in the medical context?
* What are the theoretical and methodological challenges of studying immobility in medical contexts?
* How can we change the ways in which we conceptualise and study stillness and fixity to address these challenges?
We are seeking chapter contributions that explore different manifestations of immobility in medical contexts. Chapters can explore the following concepts (or additional manifestations of immobility not featured here):
1. Stillness: physical and imagined restrictions of movement and a sense of “stuckedness” fixity or “going nowhere” (Hage 2009).
2. In-betweeness: conditions and practices of uncertainty, in-betweeness, never-ending transition, and waiting (Szakolczai 2009).
3. Motility: the potential for movement, aspirations for movement that are never materialised, movement imaginaries, ideas of incompleteness and never-arriving (Leivestad 2016).
4. Emptiness: affective dimensions of immobility, for instance, states or emotions that might be unavailable (Deleuze 2004).
The chapters included in the edited volume might cover more than one dimension as these overlap conceptually. We would also encourage authors to propose additional topics to those outlined above.
Please submit an abstract (300 words), author names and affiliations by 20th December 2018. Full manuscripts for accepted abstracts will be due in April 2019.
Abstracts and queries should be sent to Cecilia Vindrola: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
References
D’Andrea, A., et al. (2011). Methodological challenges and innovations in mobilities research. Mobilities 6(2): 149-160.
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
Hage, G., ed. (2009). Waiting. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Hannam, K., Sheller, M. Urry, J. (2006). Editorial: Mobilites, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities 1(1): 1-22.
Khan, N. (2016). “Immobility.” In: Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, edited by Noel Salazar and Kiran Jayaram, 93-112. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books.
Leivestad, H. H. (2016). “Motility.” In: Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements, edited by Noel Salazar and Kiran Jayaram, 133-151. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books.
Llewellyn, H., et al. (2017), Topographies of ‘care pathways’ and ‘healthscapes’: Reconsidering the multiple journeys of people with a brain tumour. Sociology of Health and Illness doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12630
Lupton, D. (2018). Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Masuda J., et al. (2017). Mobilities of wellbeing in children’s health promotion: Confronting urban settings in geographically informed theory and practice. In: Children’s Health and Wellbeing in Urban Environments, C. Ergler, R. Kearns and K. Witten, (eds.), pp. 207-222. London: Routledge.
Salazar, N., Smart, A. (2011). Anthropological takes on (im)mobility. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18: i-ix.
Soderstrom, O., et al. (2013). Critical Mobilities. London: Routledge.
Song, P. (2010). Biotech pilgrims and the transnational quest for stem cell cures. Medical Anthropology 29(4): 384-402.
Szakolczai, A. (2009). Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events. International Political Anthropology 2: 141-172.
Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Vindrola-Padros, C., Johnson, G., Pfister, A. (2018). Healthcare in Motion: Immobilities in Health Service Delivery and Access. Berghahn Books: New York.
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