Yale University is pleased to host the 16th meeting of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine on October 5-6, 2018 in New Haven. JAS Med is convened annually for the presentation of research by young scholars working on the history of medicine and public health. The meeting was founded in 2002 to foster a collegial community that provides a forum for sharing and critiquing graduate student research.
JAS Med welcomes student presentations on any topic, and they especially hope to receive submissions that speak to this year’s theme: Networks of Health and Healing. This theme pulls our attention to the social relations of health and well-being that exist between traditional “nodes” of medicine and health care (i.e. hospitals, universities, and research institutions). These collectives of care might compliment established medicine in some way, or they might challenge it. They may be described as “innovative,” “dynamic,” and “intimate,” or as “alternative,” “pseudoscientific,” or “illegal.” Healing entanglements might exist within a family or a neighborhood, or they might transcend national boundaries. They may align with radical politics, but may also be ordinary ways of healing and surviving. We welcome historical projects from all time periods as well as scholarly work in adjacent fields including anthropology, sociology, public health, bioethics, law, gender and sexuality studies, and race, ethnicity, and justice studies.
Although they often lack the visibility of traditional medical nodes, networks of health and healing make up an important dimension of the history of medicine and public health that has to do with how people cared for themselves on a daily basis. Meaningful health relationships could exist beyond the walls of medical institutions and without the objective of inclusion in those institutions. Healing networks often appear in margins of medical institutional archives, and their silences tend to leave more questions than answers. What does care look like before and after the institution? How do communities provide for themselves when access to medical care is denied or cannot be trusted? How have people survived in medical care “deserts”? How is power concentrated or diffused within “unofficial” healing relationships? How do health networks connect to medical nodes? Who gets to define terms such as “network,” “health,” and “medicine”? What kinds of medical futures can be imagined in bottom-up or community-based health networks?
- Topics encompassed by this theme include but are by no means limited to:
- The circulation of medical knowledge
- The exploitation and extraction of medical knowledge
- Community responses to medical racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or gender binarism
- Tools, technologies, and practices in the making of health communities
- Health and medical activism
- Alternative spaces and infrastructures of medical care
- The labor of care
- Health ideals and imaginaries
Abstracts of 300 words should clearly convey the argument, sources, and relationship to existing literature. Please submit online at http://jashistofmed.wordpress.com/abstract-submission/ no later than June 15, 2018.
Registration for the conference is free and is open until September 14, 2018.
If you have any questions, please be in touch via email at jashistofmed@gmail.com (Liana DeMarco and Megann Licskai). JAS Med looks forward to welcoming you to New Haven in October!