Appel à contribution – Mapping global health

Proposed session(s) for 4S 2011

We are looking for proposals for an interdisciplinary panel (or stream of panels) for the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Cleveland this November.

« Global Health » is an increasingly prominent field that motivates scientific research, philanthropy, international organizations, and university programs. Despite the enormous attention the field is generating, it is not entirely clear what makes it distinct from older schemas such as of international health, tropical medicine, or public health. In this panel, we hope to map the varied material, political, and ethical formations that are increasingly associated with global health. We are especially interested in the practices and technologies of knowledge-making, and how they might make global health distinct from older paradigms of collective health. Some questions that we hope to address include:

-What are new and old forms of expertise that are associated with global health?
-Are there emerging technologies and epistemic frameworks that constitute ‘the global’ and ‘health’ in distinct ways?
-Is global health creating new ethical and political relationships between individual human beings and collectivities?

We welcome abstracts on these and other related questions. We are equally interested in scholars working on particular local and national settings and those who are focused on explicitly ‘global’ projects.

Deadline for submitting abstracts: March 10, 2011. Please email abstracts to mahajanm@newschool.edu <mailto:mahajanm@newschool.edu> .

Co-organizers: Manjari Mahajan (New School University); Jeremy Greene (Harvard University); Tobias Rees (McGill University); and Andrew Lakoff (University of Southern California).