International Conference on Disease and Crime: Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health


International Conference on Disease and Crime: Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health
Hong Kong


The Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce the forthcoming international workshop, Disease and Crime: Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health, to take place at the University of Hong Kong on 18 and 19 April 2011.

Today, state-sponsored approaches to the threat of new and re-emergent diseases are increasingly being framed in terms of national "security". By the same token, anti-crime interventions are being conceptualized as emerging public health measures. Disease and Crime: Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health considers this conflation of sickness and crime from different disciplinary perspectives, addressing, in particular, the following questions: How have disease and crime come to be equated historically? What role has global interdependence played in shaping new approaches to the identification, management and treatment of crime-as-sickness and infection-as-wrongdoing? And finally, what are the social, cultural, and political implications of the disease-crime equation?

Whilst much has been written about the origins of modern criminology in nineteenth-century evolutionary theories, physiognomy, phrenology and anthropology, few attempts have been made to explore the relationship between this historical socialization and biologization of "deviancy" and the contemporary application of medical and public health strategies of crime.

This workshop investigates the ways in which, for example, epidemiological models are being employed to map new pathologies of violence, whilst, conversely, diseases are construed as forms of novel crime. Four panels on Infection, Youth, Sex and Race will develop critical perspectives on the theme, drawing on history, sociology, anthropology, medicine and public health. The aim is to trace the interconnections between state-sponsored responses to health and criminality from the nineteenth century to the present and from the US and the Europe to East Asia.

For more information about the event, please contact the Centre for the Humanities and medicine at chm1@hku.hk or visit www.chm.hku.hk


Maria Sin
Centre for the Humanities and Medicine
The University of Hong Kong
Email: chm1@hku.hk