[Bilimsel Haber] AGAINST HEALTH: RESISTING THE INVISIBLE MORALITY

[gonul at pultar.org]

Conference Announcement: AGAINST HEALTH: RESISTING THE INVISIBLE MORALITY

An international interdisciplinary conference provocatively titled  
AGAINST HEALTH will take place in the Rackham Amphitheater on the  
University of Michigan campus on October 12-13 2006. The conference  
will call on the expertise of a vast array of disciplines to examine  
the ways in which the category of "health," the norms associated with  
"health," and the social functioning of those norms are, in some  
instances, at odds with human well being. Of particular interest are  
the ways that certain appeals to health risk authorizing,  
justifying,and immunizing from possible criticism an array of  
practices and power relations that would otherwise be vulnerable to  
challenge. We aim to explore, thus, how politics, ideologies about  
race, gender and class,social norms and mores, and economic structures  
all work to define "health" in ways that benefit certain groups of  
people while excluding others.

The two-day format will encourage the broadest possible exchange among  
participants and presenters. Day one features a panel of four  
experts(Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at  
Northwestern Law School, Kathleen LeBesco, assistant professor of  
communication arts at Marymount Manhattan College and author of  
Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, Susan Kippax,  
head of the NationalCenter in HIV Social Research at the University of  
New South Wales, CarlElliott, Professor of Bioethics at the University  
of Minnesota). Each panelist will speak for roughly twenty minutes at  
a large communal panel in the morning, and then lead an interactive  
workshop in the afternoon.

Other day-one highlights include an opening address by the Cornell  
literary scholar Richard Klein and a lunchtime keynote by the former  
U.S. Surgeon General M. Joycelyn Elders.

Highlights of day two include a series of interactive  
seminars(featuring, thus far, Rebecca Herzig [Bates College], Roddey  
Reid [UCSD], Sarah Jain [Stanford], Brad Lewis [NYU], Eric Rofes  
[Humboldt State], Kane Race [UNSW], Petra Kuppers [UM]), a keynote  
address by Susan Love (Clinical Professor of Surgery at the David  
Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA), and a raucous closing party.

This conference is organized through the University of Michigan's  
Program in Culture, Health and Medicine, which is housed in the UM  
Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Advance registration  
required. Details, including transportation and lodging information,  
coming SOON to the conference website:  
http://www.umich.edu/againsthealth

Conference Chair: Jonathan Metzl, Associate Professor of Women's  
Studies and Psychiatry, University of Michigan, jmetzl at umich.edu

Conference Organizer: Sacha Feirstein, databirth at hotmail.com

Email: jmetzl at umich.edu, databirth at hotmail.com

Visit the website at http://www.umich.edu/againsthealth