FYI: CfP - conference on the materiality and politics of (sanitary,
military, nuclear...) containment. In case it is of your interest (if
not, sincere apologies).
Best,
,-J
MATTERS OF CONTAINMENT
Material approaches to the handling of threats in the modern world
3rd International Conference of the Quarantine Studies Network
Lisbon-Évora (Portugal), 28-29 May 2020
Past conferences of the QSN network in Malta and Mallorca explored an
expansion of the classical study of quarantines and sanitary cordons
into an interdisciplinary field of “quarantine studies” so that their
multiple political, military, social, economic and, of course, health
dimensions were systematically brought to the foreground. In this third
conference, we intend to take a more decided step in that direction by
exploring the material realities of containment anywhere in the world
and preferably for the period 1750-today.
The word “containment” is usually given two meanings: 1: the act of
keeping a hazard within limits, for example, an epidemic disease or a
radioactive leakage; 2: the policy of preventing an hostile military,
economic or ideological expansion. Both meanings could be - and usually
are - intertwined, as can be seen, for example, in the scientific and
political measures taken to check the “threats” associated with the
Mecca pilgrimage in the 19th century, the Soviet Revolution in 1917 or
the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.
This transversal nature of containment can be better grasped through a
focus on its often neglected material aspects. Containment ultimately
consists of the handling of threatening human bodies, living beings,
objects and ideas, which is always performed by specialized groups of
humans who use various tools and techniques to carry out different types
of actions in a large variety of spaces. In this sense, for example, the
detention and examination of the bodies of migrants aims to provide at
the same time sanitary, ideological and economic “protection”; measuring
tools used in customs’ laboratories may guard the health of a country’s
population against adulterated products and the country’s industry or
agriculture against the “damage” caused by the “invasion” of another
country’s products. Materiality can also provide a more accurate picture
of the actual scope, the effectiveness and consequences (social,
political, economic, spatial or environmental) of containment measures,
as well as of historical continuities and the collective memory about them.
We invite researchers from any disciplinary background to present their
contributions to this conference, by sending a 250-word abstract and a
short CV to the following email: [log in to unmask]
The deadline for receiving abstracts will be 20th December 2019.
Although the conference official language is English, papers in other
languages would be considered.
The organizing committee: Celia Miralles Buil (CIUHCT), Francisco Javier
Martínez (CIDEHUS), Laurinda Abreu (CIDEHUS)
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