About the workshop
The emergence and rise of biomedicine in the last few centuries has done much to configure the conceptual terrain of the social sciences and humanities. An arena in which relations between individual and society, between experience and formal knowledge, and between institutions and everyday life are constantly being negotiated, medicine offers a high-stakes site for innovative scholarship in the human sciences. Thus, science studies has begun to describe the great epistemological, ethical, and biological diversities in biomedical domains; anthropology has clarified the contingencies of medicine and healing through comparative research around the world; social psychology and linguistics have specified the social relations in play and the subjectivities produced in practical settings; and critical social services research has revealed some of the contradictions intrinsic to all our efforts to intervene therapeutically in the social.
With a focus on the embodiment of health and illness, the workshop explores issues of practice and experience throughout medicine, psychiatry, and related scientific endeavors. It seeks to provide a venue for reports on therapeutic and bodily matters from several disciplinary orientations and from a variety of Western and non-Western settings.