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AAG 2019 Call for Papers *Bodily Ecologies, DIY Medicine, and the Construction of New Health Knowledges* Session Organizers: Skye Naslund, University of Washington Chelsea Leiper, University of Delaware *Sponsored by the Cultural and Political Ecology Speciality Group and Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group* Recent research in the health and medical sciences has actualized the idea of the body as an ecosystem, one that is porous, malleable, and dependent on a number of non-human collaborators. These new advances in the biomedical sciences, particularly the "omic" sciences (e.g., genomics, microbiomics, nutrigenomics, etc.), have exacerbated the individualization of health, suggesting that the future of healthcare will be based on more personalized health interventions geared toward an increasingly complex, quantifiable, and malleable self. However, clinical applications based on developments in these areas of research struggle to keep pace with the rate at which new information is produced. This reality, coupled with neoliberal constraints on the doctor-patient relationship in current healthcare systems, means that an eager, health-conscious public is increasingly taking health into their own hands. With the popularization of websites like WebMD, the rise of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) medicine and biohacking, and the growth in disease- or treatment-specific online communities, lay individuals are increasingly shifting from relatively passive recipients of health care to active researchers, decision-makers, and propagators of health knowledge. As such, there is a growing trend toward democratized health knowledge production and away from the historical dominance of 'expert'-based epistemologies. As the expert position of doctors and medical researchers is called into question, so too is their reliance on the double-blind, placebo-controlled, large-scale clinical trial. Instead, anecdotal evidence and collective self-experimentation become the stand-in measure for a treatment's efficacy, with the internet playing a crucial role in the development, collaboration, and dissemination of new health knowledges. While scholars have grappled with new conceptualizations of the body and health (cf., Guthman and Mansfield 2013, Jackson and Neely 2015, Lorimer 2017), new methods of knowledge production such as embodied knowledges (cf. Parr 2002, Colls 2007, Dyck 2010, Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2013), and changing politics of health care (cf. Crooks et al. 2008, Andrews et al. 2010, Curtis & Riva 2010, Attwell et al. 2018), for this session, we are interested in scholarship that brings these topics into conversation with one another. We invite a diverse set of papers that draw upon innovative methods, theoretical frameworks, and/or underexplored themes/empirics to discuss the construction of new health knowledges around the body and bodily ecologies. Possible paper topics might include but are not limited to: - Alternative networks of health knowledge production and dissemination - How alternative health knowledge production networks work to discredit or legitimize certain illnesses, treatments, models of health, etc. - Embodied knowledges and the body as a site of knowledge production - Self-experimentation, DIY medical interventions, biohacking, health-based citizen science - Contested illnesses and controversial/alternative medical treatments - Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) - Tensions between different types of health knowledges: lay v. expert, visceral/embodied v. logical/minded, etc. - The incorporation (or rejection) of non-Western health practices in Western medicine Please email any questions and abstracts (250 words) to session co-organizers Skye Naslund ([log in to unmask]) and Chelsea Leiper ( [log in to unmask]) by *October 15th*. Authors will be notified by October 20th and must register and submit their abstracts to the AAG website by October 25th. *References:* Andrews, G, Adams, J., & Sergott, J. (2010). Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM): Production, consumption, research. In T. Brown, S. McLafferty, and G. Moon (eds), *A Companion to Health and Medical Geography* <http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405170034.html>, Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 587-603. Attwell, K., Ward, P., Meyer, S., Rokkas, P., & Leask, J. (2018). "Do-it-yourself": Vaccine rejection and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). *Social Science & Medicine 196*, 106-114. Colls, R. (2007). Materialising bodily matter: Intra-action and the embodiment of 'Fat'. *Geoforum 38*(2), 353-365. Crooks, V., Dorn, M., Wilton, R. (2008). Emerging scholarship in the geographies of disability. *Health & Place 14*(4), 883-888. Curtis, S. & Riva, M. (2010). Health geographies II: Complexity and health care systems and policy. *Progress in Human Geography 34*(4), 513-520. Dyck, I. (2010). Geographies of disability: Reflections on new body knowledges. In V. Chouinard, E. Hall, & R. Wilton (eds.), *Toward Enabling Geographies: 'Disabled' Bodies and Minds in Society and Space, *New York: Routledge, 253-264. Hayes-Conroy, J. & Hayes-Conroy, A. (2013). Veggies and visceralities: A political ecology of food and feeling. *Emotion, Space and Society 6*, 81–90. Guthman, J. & Mansfield, B. (2013). The implications of environmental epigenetics: a new direction for geographic inquiry on health, space, and nature-society relations. *Progress in Human Geography 37*(4), 486-504. Jackson, P. & Neely, A. (2015). Triangulating health: Toward a practice of political ecology in health. *Progress in Human Geography 39*(1), 47-64. Lorimer, J. (2017). Probiotic environmentalities: Rewilding with wolves and worms. *Theory, Culture and Society 34*(4), 27-48. Parr, H. (2002). New body-geographies: The embodied spaces of health and medical information on the Internet. *Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 20*(1), 73-95. -- Skye Naslund Department of Geography University of Washington Box 353550 Seattle, WA 98195-3550 ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CRIT-GEOG-FORUM list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CRIT-GEOG-FORUM&A=1