CfP: Society for the Social History of Medicine

Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM)

Call for Papers

2018 Biennial Conference – University of Liverpool

11-13 July 2018

The Society welcomes proposals on the theme of
Conformity, Resistance, Dialogue and Deviance in Health and Medicine’

Deadline for Proposals
Friday 2 February 2018

The Society for the Social History of Medicine hosts a major biennial, international, and interdisciplinary conference. In July 2018 it will meet in Liverpool to explore the theme of ‘Conformity, Resistance, Dialogue and Deviance in Health and Medicine’.

This broad theme plays on several levels. It reflects our local Liverpool health heritage as a site of public health innovation; independent and at times radical approaches to health politics, health inequalities, health determinants, treatment and therapies (including technological innovation, community and collective practices, and the use of arts in health).
We envisage that this conference theme will also stimulate participants to think about how medical orthodoxy has been shaped and re-molded, and how patients and practitioners choose to conform to conventional practices, seek alternatives, resist or compromise. The theme further facilitates a transnational conference strand, examining the construction of, and attitudes towards, Western and other medical traditions and health systems. In light of this theme, the 2018 conference committee encourages papers, sessions, round-tables and other interventions that examine, challenge, and refine histories of conformity, resistance, dialogue and deviance in medicine and health. These might be set in relation to inclusions, exclusions and injustices; insiders, outsiders and mediators; peoples, places and cultures; and diverse and expanding new social histories of health and medicine.

But the biennial conference is not exclusive in terms of its theme, and reflects the diversity of the discipline of the social history of medicine. Proposals that consider all topics relevant to histories of health and medicine broadly conceived are invited. Nor are submissions   restricted to any area of study: we welcome a range of disciplinary approaches, time periods and geographical contexts. Submissions from scholars across the range of career stages are most welcome, and especially from postgraduate and early career researchers.


Possible topics include:

  • Health and medicine in colonial, postcolonial and transnational contexts
  • The political economy of health and medicine
  • Theories and practices of conformity and deviancy in health and medicine
  • New ways of framing working within the social history of medicine
  • Radical politics and resistance to dominant medical knowledge and practice
  • Critical theory and social movements such as feminist, postcolonial, disability and queer theory and activism in relation to health and medicine
  • Relations between different cultures of health and medicine
  • Inequalities of health and medical care
  • Public health
  • The environment and health
  • Animals, disease and health
  • Work and health
  • Arts and health
  • Popular representations of health and medicine

Individual submissions should include a 250 word abstract, including five key words and a one paragraph CV/resume with contact information.
Panel submissions should include three papers (each with a 250 word abstract, including five key words and a short CV), a chair, and a 100-word panel abstract.
Round table submissions should include the names of four participants (each with a short CV), a chair, a 500-word abstract and five key words.
We also invite poster presentations, short films and ideas for new sessions.


Call closes Friday 2 February 2018 1700 GMT

All submissions and enquiries to be sent to