Registration is now open for a two-day
conference from the 'Visual Representations of the Third Plague'
project. Attendance is free.
Assembling Epidemics: Disease, Ecology and the (Un)natural
8 - 9 September 2017
CRASSH, Alison Richard Building
University of Cambridge
Epidemic events have profoundly shaped human perceptions of
the natural world and human ways of relating to and engaging
with nature. Across everyday speech and in the health related
sciences, vocabularies and registers of nature and naturalness
are used to describe the complexity and ground the contingency
of epidemic outbreaks. Epidemics are often seen and acted upon
as resulting from an anthropogenic imbalance in nature. Equally,
epidemics are events that exacerbate the marginalization of
oppressed and stigmatized people, naturalizing their
vulnerability to pathogens by associating their practices,
relations and ways of being with contagion and crisis.
Critical perspectives in historical and social sciences have
argued that epidemics should be seen not as a rupture in the
natural order, but rather as politically ordained and socially
distributed crises. Epidemics, from this perspective, are
created out of scarcity, neglect, as well as structural and slow
violence.
Bringing together interdisciplinary discussions across medical
anthropology, social epidemiology, political ecology and human
geography, this conference connects perceptions of the natural
world as a threat to human health, and of epidemics as a result
of human intervention in the natural, to practices and
trajectories (discursive, aesthetic, and political) of
naturalization.
Convenors:
Christos Lynteris, Lukas Engelmann, Nick Evans, Branwyn
Poleykett
Further information available at http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/27212
Enquiries: [log in to unmask]
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Samantha Peel
Project Administrator, CRASSH
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