Dear Colleagues:
I hope the new year finds you well! Please see the CFP below for a panel on
the 2025 Health, Environment, and Anthropology
(HEAT) Conference, to be held at Durham University, UK, April 23-24,
2025, co-organised by Durham and Edinburgh universities and sponsored by the
Royal Anthropological Society (RAI). Abstracts can be submitted via the
Abstract
Management portal. The website includes guidance and a list
of panels a proposer can select from.
The call is scheduled to close on 13 January, although we will keep this under
review and extend if it seems necessary.
Many thanks,
Andrea
Panel #21: Intimate mediation: hormones and endocrine disruption across
species, place, and time
Keywords: hormones, chemicals, endocrine disruption, EDCs, plastics,
prescription drugs, side effects, alterlife, green chemistry
This panel invites consideration of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) as a
key link between health and environment. EDCs are synthetic chemicals that
interact with the hormonal messaging processes of humans and other animals,
commonly found in everyday items, notably many plastics. These ubiquitous
substances transcend local environments through weather patterns and
industrial chains, defy consumer rationales of personal protection through
"organic" or "green" choices, and have effects that are unpredictable and may
remain latent for generations. EDCs are now constitutive of our bodies,
complicating any ideas about an un-altered "pure" state, and have been linked
to health issues as disparate as diabetes, endometriosis, asthma, early
puberty, obesity, and gender dysphoria. There is good reason to consider
hormonally-active pharmaceuticals as EDCs, particularly given how they can
exceed the consumer's bodily system and enter into waterways and other shared
environments. EDCs trouble standard political positions around individual
autonomy and choice, complicating conservative impulses towards protectionism
and immunity. Studying "the exposome" troubles standard ways of making
knowledge about chemicals: chemical effects come into being in interaction
with one another instead of as isolated variables, and timing of exposure
often matters more than dosage (counter to the toxicological maxim 'the dose
makes the poison'). Add to this the lobbying pressure from petroleum and
chemical industries, and it is clear why it can be profoundly difficult to
acknowledge and take action about EDCs. Yet, some medical research centers,
activist groups, artists, and even industrial initiatives around "green
chemistry" are doing so. This nexus begs further anthropological inquiry.
--
Andrea Ford, PhD
(she/her)
Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Social Sciences and Humanities
Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and
Society | Usher
Institute | University of Edinburgh Medical
School
[signature_156742838]
Newest books: Near Birth and
Hormonal Theory
Recent publications:
How to Categorise Disease? Endometriosis, Inflammation, and Self Out of
Place. Medicine
Anthropology Theory 11(1).
The Immune System, Immunity and Immune Logics: Troubling Fixed Boundaries and
(Re) Conceptualizing
Relations. Medicine
Anthropology Theory 11(1).
Hormonal Stories: A New Materialist Exploration of Hormonal Emplotment in Four
Case Studies.
BioSocieties.
How and Why to Use Vulnerability: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Disease
Risk, Indeterminacy and Normality. BMJ
Medical Humanities 50.
Hormonal Health: Period Tracking Apps, Wellness, and Self-Management within
Surveillance Capitalism. Engaging
Science, Technology, and Society 7(1).
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with
registration number SC005336. Is e buidheann carthannais a th ann an Oilthigh
Dhn ideann, clraichte an Alba, ireamh clraidh SC005336.
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