2006 Workshop 005 Workshop

2006 Models and Prediction Workshop 

           2005 Making Society, Knowing Society Workshop

Workshop Schedule         Abstracts         Speaker Bios         Logistics

 

Workshop Overview

“Healthscapes and Body States: Politics and Practices of Biomedicine”

This two-day research workshop organized by the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego will bring together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the topics of health, disease, and biomedicine. In each of six sessions, one of our invited speakers will present recent work, and Science Studies Program graduate students will frame a critical discussion of that work. (Please click on the links on this page for details on the speakers, their presentations, and the schedule for the workshop.)

As science studies scholars, we seek to move beyond an analysis of health and medicine as “systems” or “institutions” to chart the historical shifts in “healthscapes” that have both material and symbolic dimensions. From the vantage point of these healthscapes, we aim to explore the ways in which scientific and political responses to disease result in the emergence of new “body states” at both the individual and the collective level. Such developments, we argue, hold profound implications not only for the treatment of disease but also for broad questions of ethics and social justice.

Speakers will draw on diverse forms of historical, cultural, social, and philosophical analysis, and the topics of presentation vary widely. However, each of these scholars is concerned with locating the embodied and practical aspects of health, disease, medical care, and biomedical research within analyses of the multiple environments in which medical meanings are created—including the physical, the social, the political, the ethical, and the scientific. By creating conversations across disparate fields, this workshop seeks to deepen our understanding of what it means to theorize health and illness in terms of both bodies and their environments.

This workshop is free and open to the public. We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation. For further information, please contact Science Studies Program Coordinator Carol Larkin (858-534-0491; ssadmin@ucsd.edu).