This workshop focuses on medical and psychiatric practices as a middle ground between the formerly dominant polarities of body as brute materiality, on the one hand, and as mere symbolic representation, on the other. It also seeks to provide a venue for reports on bodily and scientific matters from several disciplinary orientations and from a variety of Western and non-Western settings. Our thematic interest for the 2009-10 academic year include the efficacies of psychiatric practice, disciplines of the body, semiotics and the senses, violence and memory, ecology and environment, development logics and humanitarian aid systems as they relate to medicine and the body, reproductive demographics and state policy, scientific and legal approaches to medicine and the body, and the institutional work of health care.