Healthscapes in Disruption

The Middle East is a laboratory to unthink the disruptive order of the world. With indiscriminate wars, depopulation, famine, erasure of the living environment, environmental catastrophe, and the pursuit of techno-populist solutions led by local hydrocarbon capitalists and global financiers, the region is today condensing world crises on a local level. Nowhere more than in the Middle East, the contradictions of global modernity and capitalism manifest themselves more brutally and synergistically.

In this second edition of the Healthscapes Annual Workshop, we invite contributors to engage with thinking the Middle East as a laboratory for studying ‘Healthscapes in Disruption.’ We are keen to experiment on the politics of health and environment as interlinked or condensed into a holistic question that has the potential to illuminate the state-of-affairs of world orders. To pursue such a conceptual agenda, we are guided by one epistemic persuasion: to work through the encounter of anti-disciplinary practices.

The workshop expects to bring together overlapping lines of inquiry situated in states of disruption as shaped and devastated by war, infrastructural fallout, health and care depletion, and spaces of social and ethical abandonment. These include, but may not be limited to, fields of inquiry related to health and environmental humanities, gender studies, the politics of health and space, architectural and geographical humanities, literary and philosophical studies, and others. The workshop immediate goal is to showcase methodological unruliness as being generative of radical unthinking and transformation in the established categories of thought in gender, health, space, and perception.

The contributions will look at the following themes and approaches:

1. Lived experiences of health and environment in contexts of disruption.

2. Concepts and frameworks for making sense of health/environment emerging out of disruptive events.

3. Experimental methods to think, represent, advance the understanding of Healthscapes in disruptive conditions.

4. Methodological, theoretical, and conceptual takes on ‘healthscapes’ in disruption in the past and present.

The workshop will take place at the University of Exeter on 12 June 2024.

To submit a paper for consideration for the workshop, please email a title, a 250-word summary, and a 100-word bio to the organisers: Professor Maziyar Ghiabi, m.ghiabi@exeter.ac.uk ; Dr Semih Celik, s.celik@exeter.ac.uk; Dr Chris Sandal-Wilson, c.w.sandal-wilson@exeter.ac.uk, Ms Hannah Cowdell, hc749@exeter.ac.uk and Mr Kamyar Salavati ks923@exeter.ac.uk.

Please include ‘Healthscapes 2024’ in the subject of your email. The deadline for submissions is Monday 30 April 2024. The organisers aim to respond to submissions by mid-May, and are pleased to be able to cover travel and accommodation for all selected participants.

As contributions will be considered part of special issue for an international peer-reviewed journal, all participants will need to send a ca. 2000 long paper ahead of the workshop, by 7 June 2024.

Healthscapes – Tabbi’at – is an interdisciplinary research network based at the University of Exeter. Led by Dr Semih Çelik, Professor Maziyar Ghiabi, and Dr Chris Sandal-Wilson, the network was founded in 2023 to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences and develop understandings of the entanglement of health and environment in the Middle East and North Africa. www.healthscapes.co.uk