Network: Health

Call for Papers

 

The next European Social Science History Association Conference will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, 27 February - 1 March 2008. For general information on the biannual conferences and the organising institution and for registration (including paper proposal procedures), see http://www.iisg.nl/esshc.

 

As chairs of the health network, we invite proposals for panels or individual papers of any subject dealing with the social history of health. While individual papers are welcome, panels consisting of three or four contributors and one chair and discussant (who can be the same person) have a higher chance of being accepted. We particularly encourage panels organised around a central theme with papers covering different perspectives on this theme, especially those with comparative approach, bringing together contributions on different regions and / or time periods. Panel participants should come from different institutes and preferably from different countries.

In addition to the classical papers and panels, we also invite offers for posters or well-organized panels for round-table discussions.

 

Suggestions are particularly encouraged on the topics listed below. But proposals on other topics are very welcome as well.

 

 

1. Global Health  - Possible sub-themes: travels of disease; the Ecological Imperialism Revisited; globalisation; plague, cholera, Aids, SARS …

 

2. Colonial Health – Themes: colonial medicine as a means of negotiating power between colonialists and colonised and also within both groups; racism; orientalism;

 

3. Occupational Health – including injuries, insurance, long-term health hazards …

 

4. Health as Commodity – Themes: developments of the market for medication, health foods and other health products; interaction between physicians, scientists and businessmen

 

5. Health in numbers - presenting ways of interpreting historical health data, either as case studies or from a theoretical point of view.

 

6. Nutrition as Health Factor – how has it interacted with cultural, economic and ideological aspects?

 

7. Health and warfare – how has health interacted with the – historically common – situation of warfare (war injuries, blockades, bacteriological warfare…)?

 

8. Health and normality – how have common conceptions changed about healthy, normal, sub-normal or pathological conditions?

 

9. Health in non-Western societies – addressing themes of health and medicine in societies outside of Europe and non-indigenous North America and Australia.

 

10. History of health as interdisciplinary project – room for overlap and cooperation with medicine, biology, economics, political science …

 

Panel chairs can also act as discussants. Discussants have an important role in stimulating discussions, which should take up a substantial part of the panel time. They can identify central issues of the papers, point of similarities and differences, raise individual or general questions or otherwise broaden the perspective on the overall themes of the panels

 

The deadline is April 1, 2007.

 

For submitting papers, please, use registration at http://www.iisg.nl/esshc. 

 

For questions, suggestions etc., please write to :

Enrique Perdiguero Gil: [log in to unmask]

And/or

Iris Borowy: [log in to unmask]