Dear all,


A final reminder of our upcoming conference below! Thanks!


Rob



https://centreforspaceplacesociety.wordpress.com/events/2017-conference/





What does “quality of life” mean anyway?



The question of the “value of life” has become increasingly pressing. The possibilities for lavish and global lifestyles for some in the 21st century are uncomfortably connected to rising global inequality, interrelated environmental, food and developmental crises and concomitant increasing pressures on humans and other living beings. Within this fast-changing context, more and more institutions and organisations focus on addressing and enhancing “quality of life.” Wageningen University – our conference’s host – hence defines its mission as: “To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life<http://www.wur.nl/en/About-Wageningen/Mission-and-vision.htm>”. But this seemingly straightforward statement raises a wealth of tricky questions. What exactly does “quality of life” mean? And what does it mean to “improve” it? How should this “quality” be measured? Can “quality” actually be measured quantitatively? Who gets to decide all of this and why? And what precisely is this “nature” whose potential is at stake in all this?



On 28-30 June 2017, more than 150 researchers from the Netherlands and around the world will come together to explore these questions and others at the international conference “The Value of Life: Measurements, Stakes Implications.” Keynote addresses by Professor Katherine Gibson<https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/katherine_gibson> of Western Sydney University and Professor Annemarie Mol<http://www.uva.nl/profiel/m/o/a.mol/a.mol.html> of University of Amsterdam – both world-renowned experts in their fields – will set the stage for the series of presentation sessions to follow over the three days. Sessions will address a wide variety of themes including “The Politics of Plants and Animals: Valuing Other Lives”, “The Production and Use of Citizen Science and Academic Knowledge in Political Grassroots Movements”, “Valuing Life: Affective Socio-Nature Encounters and Co-Becomings”, and “Whose Heritages Matter? Re-imagining ‘Dutch-ness’ through Migration In and Beyond the Netherlands”, among many others. All sessions are united, however, in a common aim: to critically but constructively create time and space to explore the deeper meanings and enactments of the quality and value of life, in all its diversity and complexities, as we plunge into the 21st century.



The conference is organized by the Centre for Space, Place and Society<https://centreforspaceplacesociety.wordpress.com/> (CSPS) of Wageningen University. It will take place at the Hotel de Wageningense Berg<https://www.hoteldewageningscheberg.nl/nl/> in beautiful Wageningen, an old, small Dutch city in the centre-east of the Netherlands, but only an hour away from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. The Hotel is situated at the edge of town, in the woods, with a magnificent view over the lower Rhine River that, we hope, will add to participants’ quality of life while they discuss and debate exactly this.



A detailed preliminary conference programme can be found here<https://centreforspaceplacesociety.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/preliminary-csps-conference-programme2.pdf>. For more information, please see our conference websites here<https://centreforspaceplacesociety.wordpress.com/events/2017-conference/> and here<https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Projects-and-programmes/International-conference-Centre-for-Space-Place-and-Society-CSPS-1.htm>. Registration is still open here<https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Projects-and-programmes/International-conference-Centre-for-Space-Place-and-Society-CSPS-1/Registration.htm> as well.







Information on the Keynote Speakers:



Katherine Gibson

Katherine Gibson<https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/katherine_gibson> is internationally known for her research on rethinking economies as sites of ethical action. She trained as a human geographer with expertise in political economy and, with her collaborator for over 30 years, the late Professor Julie Graham, developed a distinctive approach to economic geography drawing on feminism, post-structuralism and action research. The diverse economies research program they initiated has become a vibrant sub-field of study within the social sciences. In the late 1990s the collective authorial voice of J.K. Gibson-Graham led the critique of capitalocentric thinking that was blocking the emergence of economic possibility. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy published in 1996, was republished in 2006 with a new Introduction and named a Classic in Human Geography by the leading journal Progress in Human Geography in 2011. Gibson-Graham's work on a post-capitalist economic politics has had a widespread readership among those interested in economic alternatives and has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Spanish and French.



Annemarie Mol

Annemarie Mol<http://www.uva.nl/profiel/m/o/a.mol/a.mol.html> is Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Amsterdam>. Winner of the Constantijn & Christiaan Huijgens Grant from the NWO in 1990 to study “Differences in Medicine”, she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2010 to study “The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory”, as well as the Spinoza Prize in 2012. She has helped to develop post-ANT<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-network_theory>/feminist<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism> understandings of science, technology and medicine. In her earlier work she explored the performativity of health care practices, argued that realities are generated within those practices, and noted that, since practices differ, so too do realities. The body, as she expressed it, is multiple: it is more than one but it is also less than many (since the different versions of the body also overlap in health care practices). This is an empirical argument about ontology<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology> (which is the branch of philosophy that explores being, existence, or the categories of being). As a part of this she also developed the notion of “ontological politics”, arguing that since realities or the conditions of possibility vary between practices, this means that they are not given but might be changed. Mol is the author of multiple books on these topics, including The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice and The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice.