The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop
This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to explore the spatial, social, environmental, and embodied geographies of pain and anaesthetics.
Identifying pain as a zone of interface between the body and the world, this workshop will investigate the meaning, role, and dynamics of pain, affliction, and suffering in the context of planetary crisis and contemporary capitalism. Thinking of pain as unevenly distributed, differentially experienced, and historically and socially produced, the workshop begins from the premise that a great variety of academics and practitioners have a stake in improving our understanding of pain, and how it is made and unmade in and between bodies.
The workshop will have two parts:
The first part (Thursday, 30 May 2024, 16:00 -20:00) will be an interdisciplinary forum, bringing people together to discuss different understandings of pain. We seek perspectives from the biomedical sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, as well as from health practitioners, trade unionists, artists, activists, performers, and more. The workshop will be open, informal, and discursive. We seek to create new conversations and collaborations around pain and its social, spatial, and embodied circulations.
The second part (Friday, 31 May 2024, 9:00 - 17:00) will focus on the relationship between pain, global capitalism, space, and environments. We invite short research papers from across disciplines on the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics:
Pain and suffering in historical and contemporary systems of labour, production and social reproduction;
Analyses of pain and suffering at the intersection(s) between the biomedical and social sciences, the humanities, and ecology and the environment;
Geographical studies of pain and suffering;
The relations between race, caste, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and pain;
Interdisciplinary approaches to the history, science, use and misuse of painkillers, analgesics, and opioids;
Critical perspectives from across disciplines and spheres of practice on the treatment of pain;
Interdisciplinary approaches to the epistemology and ontology of pain.
Please submit a 200-word abstract to a.davies@qmul.ac.uk. If you would like to contribute to the second part of the workshop in a different medium (visual art, performance, case study, etc), you would be welcome to do so. Please email the organisers with any further questions.
Please register here to attend. You are invited to come to all or part of the workshop.
A small number of travel and accommodation bursaries will be available for early career / unwaged researchers and practitioners. Workshop organised in association with the QMUL School of Geography, the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP), and the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.