CFP: CHCI Medical and Health Humanities Network Summer Institute

Columbia Global Centers | Paris

June 14-15, 2019

“Health Beyond Borders”

The CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network is a partnership of over 30 universities worldwide working in the medical and health humanities. In 2019, the annual Summer Institute of the CHCI HMHN will be hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, with the theme, “Health Beyond Borders.”

Human health is shaped by borders—from the protected space of the hospital to the international
boundaries that govern the health of populations. But even as borders offer a way of delineating
health and disease in physical space, the border itself is often understood as a boundary to be
transcended or a frontier to be crossed. The notion of moving beyond borders helps to make sense
of broader trends in global health, from debates about migration, contested sovereignty, and
environmental accords to the boundary-crossing work of clinicians such as the Médecins sans
frontières. Within the medical and health humanities, the border provides a rich zone for
investigation into how well-being is constituted across a continuum of individuals and populations.
Importantly, at the heart of the concept of the border is the issue of representation : borders are
necessarily shaped as much by human expression as they are by physical markers.
This conference explores the interdisciplinary facets of the border, from the metaphorical to the
political: What counts as a border in an embodied, geographical, legal, or artistic context? What are
the debates around borders in medical practice, from hospitalist medicine to epidemiology? How
and why do health practitioners refer to the border for its rhetorical power, and how does the
border work productively as a figure in narrative medicine, medical memoirs, and creative
literature? What are the processes and structures that define well-being across borders, from
nationalist immigration policies to environmental protections? How do we understand efforts to
confront, dismantle, or transcend borders in healthcare? What role do borders play in the formation
of state-sanctioned health policies, and how might these enable or obstruct initiatives in global
health? And how might the concept of the boundary reshape our visions of a future health beyond
borders?

Keynote Speakers

Jens Brockmeier (The American University of Paris), Ghada Hatem (Maison des Femmes, Paris),
Samuel Roberts (Columbia University), Craig Spencer (Columbia University)

Call for Papers
We invite proposa
ls for traditional 20-minute papers (350-word abstracts), and for complete panels
(350-word abstracts for each paper accompanied by a cover-letter describing the aims of the panel
as a whole). All papers are subject to the vetting of the conference committee.
Deadline for paper proposals and complete panels: January 15, 2019.
Please send all proposals to Liz Bowen ( elb2157@columbia.edu ). All proposals must include your
name, academic affiliation (if any), and preferred email address. Questions may be addressed to Dr.
Loren Wolfe ( lw2505@columbia.edu ) and Dr. Arden Hegele ( aah2155@columbia.edu ).
Conference Steering Committee (Columbia University and Columbia Global Centers | Paris)
Arden Hegele, Loren Wolfe, Eileen Gillooly, Rishi Goyal
CHCI Steering Committee
Rishi Goyal (Columbia University), Brian Hurwitz (King’s College London), Deborah Jenson (Duke
University), Maheshvari Naidu (University of KwaZulu-Natal), Kathryn Rhine (University of Kansas)
Access and support requirements: The conference is located at Columbia Global Centers | Paris
(Reid Hall), in Montparnasse. If you have any access or support requirements please let us know as
soon as possible so that we can do our best to facilitate your needs.



CFP: Health Humanities Summer School: Columbia Global Centers Paris and
Alliance Network
Columbia Global Centers | Paris

June 17-19 2019

The CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Network is a partnership of over 30 universities worldwide working in the medical and health humanities. In 2019, the annual Summer Institute of the HMHN
will be hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, with the theme, “Health Beyond Borders.”

As part of this Summer Institute, and partnering with the Alliance Network, we are organizing a
3-day intensive summer school on June 17-19, following the conference (June 14-15). We invite
applications from graduate students and early career researchers from a range of disciplines,
including but not limited to anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, history, journalism, law,
languages, literatures, medicine, narrative medicine, psychology, political science, peace studies,
film, audio-visual arts, theatre studies, and the creative and performing arts to apply for this
international, cross-disciplinary summer school. Faculty and participants of the summer school will
explore perspectives, approaches, frameworks, and frames of reference on the topic of the health
and medical humanities.

The summer school will be delivered through a range of seminars, discussions, participant
presentations, workshops, film and performance viewings, and site visits. Participants will present a
workshop paper at the summer school which will be pre-circulated to faculty and fellow participants
prior to arrival.

Participants are expected to engage and contribute to every aspect of the summer school. Through
this summer school, we are hoping to inspire a network of scholars in the area of health humanities
to continue to support and work with one another after the summer school has ended.
We accept applications from graduate students and early career researchers who received their PhD
after September 2013. We are committed to assembling a diverse and inclusive academic
community. Toward this end, we especially encourage applications from members of
underrepresented groups and those whose interests contribute to realizing this goal.

Application

If you would like to apply for the Health Humanities Summer School, please send a CV, brief
statement of interest, and 350-word paper abstract to Liz Bowen ( elb2157@columbia.edu ) by
January 15, 2019. You will be required to enroll at the CHCI Medical and Health Humanities Network Summer Institute on June 14-15 (student rates available).

We will notify successful applicants by the beginning of March. Funding opportunities are available
for a limited number of Columbia graduate students to travel to the summer school .

Access and support requirements: The conference is located at Columbia Global Centers | Paris
(Reid Hall), in Montparnasse. If you have any access or support requirements please let us know as
soon as possible so that we can do our best to facilitate your needs.

Whipple Library exhibition: Curating the Chemical Elements: Julius Lothar Meyer's Periodic Systems

"To celebrate the one event which will forever be associated with 2019 – yes, the UN & IUPAC’s Celebratory Year of the Periodic System of Elements – we are very pleased to announce the opening on Monday of our latest Whipple Library display. Curating the Chemical Elements: Julius Lothar Meyer’s Periodic Systems has been put together by HPS PhD student Karoliina Pulkkinen.

Karolina had this to say about the inspiration behind the exhibition:

The logo for the Un & IUPAC year depicts the “father of the periodic law”, Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, who is placed next to a chemical element named after him. As a researcher working on the history of periodic system, I want you to look at that picture, squint your eyes, and imagine another bearded man there instead of Mendeleev. I ask you to do this because there were in fact several other bearded men who could be placed on that logo.

Like historian Michael Gordin, who has written a marvellous book on Mendeleev, I confess that I have little idea of who actually discovered the periodic system of chemical elements. From all the bearded men that could be titled as its discoverers, however, I would like to direct attention to a German chemist called Julius Lothar Meyer in particular. This exhibition presents Meyer’s systematisation of the elements. Arguably, Meyer’s graphs give us the most striking early visualisation of the periodic relationship between the mass of the elements and their chemical properties.

Many a time have I felt grateful for conducting my historical investigations in 2015-2019 rather than fifteen, thirty, or fifty years earlier. Apart from being able to move from one European conference to another with relative ease, I can press Ctrl+F, follow electronic trails, and download a PDF of books put together by scholars of Soviet Union. The vast majority of the sources I needed were available from the first week of my PhD.

But some things are best studied in life rather than on screen. Things too fragile, or too inconveniently put together for scanners and cameras. One such thing is Lothar Meyer’s graph showing the periodicity of chemical elements.

You would struggle to find a digitisation that shows its full scope and detail online, and big thanks are due to the staff at the Chemistry Library and Conservation at the UL for providing us with the original document. One can try to show it all on screen, (and together with the staff of Whipple, we have tried to ensure a Comfortable Online Viewing Experience), but you should come over to Free School Lane and have a look yourself. If I had the resources, I would put it on a bus: here at Whipple, you will learn something about the experts who you will not get enough of!

The exhibition is taking place in the usual cases on Level 1 of the Haycock Theatre at the Whipple Library, and can be viewed by anyone during library opening hours. We have also put together a virtual exhibition, which you can view here: https://www.whipplelib.hps.cam.ac.uk/special/exhibitions-and-displays/curating-chemical-elements

The exhibition will be on until March 2019, and we hope as many of you as possible will be able to stop by and enjoy!"

CFP - SLSA Europe