Dear colleagues,
We hope this finds you well.
Feel warmly invited to join us for an academic paper workshop and
special issue on “Theorizing through the mundane: storying
transformations in healthcare.”
The workshop will take place from the 4th to the 6th June 2025 at the
Department of Sociology, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Participants need to submit a paper draft beforehand, which will be
discussed during the workshop. On the third day, we will engage in
alternative formats (walking, writing, etc.) to think through the
mundane. The special issue will be based on the workshop and submitted
to a major STS journal (currently envisaged S&TS).
Abstract submission deadline (250 words): December 1, 2024.
More details below and attached.
With best wishes,
Anna Mann, Lisa Lindén and Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent
Abstract:
As a ‘big story’ concern, transformations in healthcare abound:
digitalization and the introduction of AI, major demographic
transformations, antimicrobial resistances, soaring healthcare staff
shortages, the emergence of transgender care, the ‘crisis’ of
maternity and neonatal care, and ever increasing health inequalities
are just a few of them. This workshop and special issue respond to
such ‘big story’ concerns in healthcare by theorizing through
‘the mundane’.
STS has a long tradition – with different beginnings – of
attending to and theorizing through ‘the mundane’. Think about for
example the mundaneness of infrastructural work (Bowker and Star
1999), the fleetingly subtle ‘here-and-now’ (Verran 1999), the
everydayness of marginalizing ‘invisible work’ (Star/Strauss 1989)
and Latour’s doorstopper (Johnson/Latour 1988). More recently, it
has been central to ‘care studies’ and ‘maintenance and repair
studies’ marked through an attention to ‘daily life matters’ and
‘tinkering’ (Mol et al. 2010), ‘exnovation’ (Mesman 2008),
‘everyday ethics’ (Pols 2023), the easily devalued as
ethico-political commitment (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011), and
overlooked situations that take place in interstices of routine and
breakdown (Denis et al. 2015).
In this workshop and special issue, we are drawing upon and extending
these rich STS accounts on ‘the mundane’ to empirically
investigate, think about and experiment with how STS scholars can
relate to and intervene in ‘transformations’ in healthcare. After,
or in addition to, the analytical sensitivities and concerns that have
been developed in the care debate (Lindén and Lydahl 2021; Mol,
Moser, Pols 2021; Martin, Myers, Viseu 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa
2011) and the field of valuation studies (Dussauge, Helgesson, Lee
2015), which have dominated research on healthcare in STS over the
past decade, the special issue seeks to – empirically, analytically,
and politically – take the next step. ‘Theorising through the
mundane’ offers a version of STS that stays responsive to the ways
we are living, dying and caring for bodies and diseases, and their
transformations, in the first half of the 21st century; it offers an
STS that transforms with and through these ways now, here, and in the
future. The workshop and special issue welcomes papers with an
empirical focus on healthcare in the large sense.
[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pdf which had a name of CFP-theorizing_through_the_mundane.pdf]
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