CfP Being Well Together: human-animal collaboration, companionship and the promotion of health and wellbeing
Call for Papers - Workshop
Being Well Together: human-animal collaboration, companionship and the
promotion of health and wellbeing (19th-21st September 2018).
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM).
University of Manchester (UK).
Being Well Together will critically examine the myriad ways humans have
formed partnerships with nonhuman species to improve health across time
and place. The late twentieth century witnessed the simultaneous rise
and diversification of varied entanglements of humans and animals in the
pursuit of health and wellbeing. Clinical examples include the use of
maggots to treat chronic wounds and the post-surgical use of leeches to
aid healing. In wider society we might consider service animals, such as
guide dogs, diabetes alert dogs, and emotional support animals. In the
home pets are increasingly recognized to contribute to emotional
wellbeing, with companion animals particularly important to those who
are otherwise at risk of social isolation. Expanded to include concepts
such as the ‘human’ microbiome in the opening decades of the
twenty-first century, these entanglements may be recognized as
‘multispecies medicine’. In each case, human health and wellbeing rests
on the cultivation of relationships with other species. Being well is a
process of being well together.
We invite proposals to explore multispecies communication, collaboration
and companionship in contexts of medicine, health and wellbeing. Areas
of interest include, but are not limited to, the lived experience of
health as a product of multispecies relations, the role of affect and
emotion in the maintenance of human and nonhuman wellbeing, and the
societal politics of ‘being well’ when ‘being well’ is a more than human
condition. The lived experience of being well with animals can reshape
understandings of health, wellbeing and disability; its study may
provide new approaches to productively frame the relationship between
the politics of animal and disability advocacy.
Participants will be drawn from a range of disciplines with interests
spanning, though not restricted to, medical and environmental
humanities. We aim to strike a balance between studies adopting
historical perspectives and those which critically examine areas of
contemporary practice. In bringing historical accounts into dialogue
with present practices, Being Well Together will generate new
perspectives on medicine, health and changing relations of human and
animal life in society.
Practical Details.
Titles and abstracts (400 words maximum) as well as general queries should be addressed to Rob Kirk (robert.g.kirk@manchester.ac.
Invited participants will provide a written draft paper for
pre-circulation (6-8000 words maximum inclusive of references) by 31st
July 2018. These ‘work-in-progress’ papers will be the starting point
for discussions at the September workshop with a view to producing an
edited volume.
Accommodation and travel costs for invited participants will be covered by the organisers.
Being Well Together is the first in a series of activities supported by
the Wellcome Trust (UK) Investigator Award, ‘Multispecies Medicine:
Biotherapy and the Ecological Vision of Health and Wellbeing’. Based at
the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine,
University of Manchester, this collaborative research project examines
how, why and to what consequence, human and nonhuman life has become
variously entangled within health, wellbeing and society.