CFP: ACLA 2014 (NYU, March 20-23) Seminar Proposal – Health and Healthcare as Capital

ACLA 2014 (NYU, March 20-23) Seminar Proposal – Health and Healthcare as
Capital
(temporary title)

This seminar seeks contributions that analyse the representations and
realities of health and healthcare as capital. Rather than limiting the
concept of 'capital' to the traditional, economic definition, we aim at
understanding health as social and cultural capital, recently defined as
'the repertoire of cultural skills, verbal and nonverbal competencies,
attitudes and behaviors, and interactional styles, cultivated by patients
and clinicians alike, that, when deployed, may result in more optimal
health care relationships' (Shim 2010, p.1).
Building on recent turns in medical humanities and medical anthropology,
as well as on the inter-disciplinary intersections between these two
fields, we will engage in questions relating – but not limited – to:


* Pain and its influence on (ethnic, gender, national, and other)
power relations
* Health as symbolic capital
* Performances of healthiness/ wellbeing and/or illness/injury in
relation to
social and economic capital
* Hospitals as capitals of health
* Healthcare and inequality
* The impact of health policy on the clinical encounter
* Literary and Filmic representations of the bureaucracy of health
* Narratives of psychological care

We are interested in theoretically oriented contributions from various
disciplines: literature, anthropology, history, visual art, cinema
studies, and others. One panel will focus on representations of health as
capital in film and television, with the two other planned panels to be
shaped based on the papers accepted.

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words in a standard word document,
along with contact information and affiliation(s), to both organizers: Dr.
Anna Elsner (anna.elsner AT kcl.ac.uk) and Omri Grinberg (o.grinberg AT
mail.utoronto.ca), by 12 August 2013. We will accept 8-11 papers,
notifications will be sent by 1 September.

For further information regarding ACLA 2014 and the seminar/panel system,
see:
http://acla.org/acla2014/

Thank you,

Omri Grinberg,
Ph.D. student, Anthropology and the Centre for Jewish Studies,
University of Toronto
19 Russel Street
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S2
Canada