Posted by C3W Admin on April 7 2022
We are seeking panelists for the panel ‘Biomedicine in Socialist Contexts’ for HSS 2022, to be held in Chicago between 17-20 November. This session aims to bring together scholars interested in exploring socialist contexts where biomedicine became a tool in health policies and global diplomacy. As the Cold War evolved, health and research networks in the so-called Second and Third Worlds participated in the development of vaccines, drugs, medical technologies, and treatments. Many of the countries, experts, and practices were connected through socialist networks, whether as led by political aims of states, ideological convictions of actors, or as a matter of convenience. While research on this subject has seen a significant increase in recent years, master narratives of the history biomedicine are mainly Western, even as a focus on empires and colonial/post-colonial contexts has shifted the historiography significantly. An inclusion of seemingly peripheral actors and sites of knowledge production and scientific practice, namely the ‘socialist world’, and its integration into the overall historiography is still to be achieved. Therefore, we particularly invite paper proposals that engage with intersections of geopolitics, (post)-colonial contexts and political ideology, and biomedicine’s place in the global Cold War. You can find the panel proposal on the HSS collaborating form as well here. Contact Dora Vargha (d.vargha@exeter.ac.uk) or Edna Suarez-Díaz (ednasuarez@ciencias.unam.mx) by April 20 – deadline for the submission of the panel for the conference is April 24.