Deadline is next Friday! Do consider submitting! Usual apologies for crossposting
- 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.