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>
> Deadline is next Friday! Do consider submitting! Usual apologies for
> crossposting
>
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> *- CALL FOR PAPERS --*
>
> *American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting*
>
> *New Orleans, Louisiana, April 10-14, 2018*
>
>
> *Bodies, environments, subjectivities: new directions in
> health-environment geographies*
>
> *Organizers: *Carly Nichols (University of Arizona) and Nari Senanayake
> (Pennsylvania State University)
>
> *Sponsoring Specialty Groups:* Cultural and Political Ecology, Health and
> Medical Geography, GPOW
>
> *Discussant: *Dr Abigail Neely (Dartmouth University)
>
>
>
> In the last 15 years, geographers have bridged interests in bodies,
> health/disease, and environments to form a broad, loosely defined, body of
> scholarship on health-environment interactions. This literature extends
> work by nature/society geographers on the sociality of nature, and
> conceptualizes (un)healthy bodies as ‘environments’ or ‘socio-biological’
> phenomenon that warrant greater attention and interest from the
> sub-discipline. Thus feminist insights that a critical scale of analysis is
> the messy, material body and its own set of situated knowledges has come to
> be a defining feature of this work (Parr 2002; Hayes-Conroy 2015; Jackson
> and Neely 2016). Consequently, scholars have endeavored to open up the
> “black box” of the body (Guthman 2012) and situate health outcomes as
> important (yet often overlooked) nature-society issues (Mansfield 2008).
> These theoretical interventions find expression in studies of
> childbirth (Mansfield 2008), food/nutrition (in)security (Carney 2014;
> Hayes-Conroy 2015) obesity/metabolic syndrome (Guthman 2011),
> human-microbial relations (Hinchcliffe et al. 2016), and tuberculosis and
> HIV/AIDS (Neely 2015; King 2017), among others.  Together, this research
> positions environmental, health, and bodily ‘states’ as dynamic entities
> that are iteratively constituted by everything from political economies to
> discourses, to lively, material and affective happenings.
>
>
>
> Clearly this work has been defined by theoretical and methodological
> pluralism and in this session, we invite a diverse set of papers that
> advance health-environment studies by drawing on innovative methods,
> theoretical frameworks, and/or underexplored themes/empirics. We encourage
> pieces that either use established approaches in new ways or develop new
> approaches by marshalling insights from cognate fields such as STS, medical
> anthropology, histories of science/medicine, and feminist science studies.
> We call on contributors to think about how engagements with literatures
> outside of geography might extend the way we understand interactions
> between health and the environment, with implications for key geographic
> concepts such as scale, bodies, nature, power, and knowledge.  In this
> session, we also push contributors to explore the points of encounter and
> contradiction between different approaches such as production of
> health/disease, social constitutions of nature/biology, affect/NRT, and
> relational ontologies/socionatural bodies. More importantly, we hope to
> stimulate a discussion of how methodological and theoretical pluralism in
> health-environment studies might be more effectively deployed to create
> socially and environmentally just geographies.
>
>
>
> Potential papers could explore areas that have been relatively
> undertheorized in health-environment studies, including but not limited
> to:
>
> ·      Subjectivities and assemblages of well-being and dis-ease
>
> ·      Mental health/emotional geographies
>
> ·      Chemical landscapes and contested environmental illnesses
>
> ·      Epigenetics, gene-environment interactions, and plastic/permeable
> bodies
>
> ·      The politics of (biomedical and bodily) knowledge and politics of
> diagnosis
>
> ·      Post-human dynamics and relational ontologies
>
> ·      Unpredictable, non-linear and/or contingent health-environment
> interactions
>
> ·      Uncertainties about health risks and how this mediates knowledges,
> experiences and outcomes
>
> ·      Intra-corporeal biology and body ecologies
>
> ·      “Disease bundles” and lived experiences of disease
>
>
>
> We invite all interested candidates to submit an abstract of no more than
> 250 words to Carly Nichols ([log in to unmask]) and Nari
> Senanayake ([log in to unmask]) by *Friday October 6th.*
>
>
> Presenters will be notified by October 20, 2017 and asked to register
> their abstracts by October 25, 2017.
>
>
>
> *Works Cited*
>
> Carney, M. A. (2014). The biopolitics of “food insecurity”: towards a
> critical political ecology of the body in studies of women’s transnational
> migration. *Journal of Political Ecology*, *21*, 1–18.
>
> Guthman, J. 2011. *Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of
> Capitalism*. University of California Press.
>
> Guthman, Julie. 2012. “Opening Up the Black Box of the Body in
> Geographical Obesity Research: Toward a Critical Political Ecology of Fat.” *Annals
> of the Association of American Geographers* 102 (5): 951–957.
>
> King, Brian. 2017. *States of Disease: Political Environments and Human
> Health*. Berkeley: Univ of California Press.
>
> Hayes-Conroy, Allison, and Jessica Hayes-Conroy. 2015. “The Political
> Ecology of the Body: A Visceral Approach.” In *The International Handbook
> of Political Ecology*, edited by Raymond L. Bryant, 659–72. Edward Elgar
> Publishing.
>
> Hinchliffe, Steve, Nick Bingham, John Allen, and Simon Carter. 2016. *Pathological
> Lives*. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
>
> Jackson, Paul, and Abigail H. Neely. 2014. “Triangulating Health Toward a
> Practice of a Political Ecology of Health.” *Progress in Human Geography* 39
> (1): 47–64.
>
> Mansfield, Becky. 2008. “Health as a Nature – Society Question.” *Environment
> and Planning A* 40 (5): 1015–19.
>
> Neely, Abigail H. 2015. “Internal Ecologies and the Limits of Local
> Biologies: A Political Ecology of Tuberculosis in the Time of AIDS.” *Annals
> of the Association of American Geographers* 105 (4): 791–805.
>
> Parr, H. (2002). Medical geography: diagnosing the body in medical and
> health geography, 1999–2000. *Progress in Human Geography*, *26*(2),
> 240–251.
>
>
-- 
Carly Nichols
PhD Student, School of Geography and Development
University of Arizona