Producing health: widening perspectives

RGS-IBG 2008 Annual Conference 27th-29th August 2008
SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Producing health: widening perspectives.
(sponsored by the Geography of Health Research Group)

Organisers: Jennifer Lea and Chris Philo (University of Glasgow)

Session Abstract:

This session is intended to bring together health, social, cultural,
political, economic and historical geographers to discuss the 'production'
of health. Although health has become a crucial term for a wide range of
geographers, the balance of analysis has tended towards the measurement of
health variations, evaluations of 'healthy' landscapes and experiencing of
'unhealthy' lives. This focus has nonetheless left health itself, as a
concept, outcome and experience, relatively unproblematised. This session
aims to take health apart, and to begin understanding it as a practiced
negotiation – between a range of institutional and individual agents, within
a diversity of networks and assemblages – rather than an assumed, and indeed
absolute concept. This gives rise to questions such as how the
health/non-health boundary is produced and maintained, what kinds of effort
are involved in maintaining the socio-technical relations implicated in
producing health, and who (human, non-human, in-human, more-than-human), is
involved in producing health?

In suggesting that health is produced across a number of registers
(arrangements of bodies, minds, objects, technologies, architectures, words,
questions, responses, medication, etc), the session moves against the
isolating of the political, economic, social, cultural etc. as discrete
explanatory realms. We wonder what theoretical and practical resources
contributors might find useful to deliver a more 'distributed' examination
of the production of health, allowing us to think beyond sub-disciplinary
locations. In particular, we call for papers from both early career and more
established researchers that address the following themes and questions:

Themes

- The relation between producing health and geographic context
- The production and maintenance of health
- Futures of the production of health
- The material effects of producing health (body-mind interrelations)
- The spatial and temporal differences in modes of producing health

Questions

- what matters in the production of health (for example political contexts,
ideologies, practices, the built environment), and how have these varied
over time and space?
- which agencies are implicated in producing health (individuals, groups,
human, non-human, more-than-human)?
- how do modes of producing "health" differ - culturally, politically,
economically, medically etc.
- how is the production of 'health' variously extended (through alternative
imaginations of health, new practices of producing health, the changing
demands of socio-cultural-political terrains)

Please send expressions of interest to jennifer.lea@ges.gla.ac.uk

Deadline for abstracts (c.200 words) 1st February 2008. Please see
http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Submit+an+abstract.htm
for more details.

For more information about the conference please see
http://www.rgs.org/WhatsOn/ConferencesAndSeminars/Annual+International+Conference/Annual+International+Conference.htm