CALL FOR PAPERS Cultivating Patients: Identities, Technologies, and Trading Zones of Patienthood

Keynote speakers: Professor Steven Epstein (Northwestern University), Professor Flurin Condrau (University of Zurich)

Over forty years ago, the history of medicine shifted its priority and focus from the medical profession and institutions to the patient’s voice (see: Porter, 1985). Scholarship from a range of fields in the subsequent decades – including the history of medicine, medical humanities, and the history of technology – has treated ‘patients’ as much more than simply the recipients of medical intervention or passive bodies at the blunt end of the medicalising process. Conversely, there is widespread acceptance that it is equally reductive to see the ‘patient’ as a subaltern agent heroically resisting a medical power imposed from above. The 'patient' in late modernity is always multiple: operating in a diverse array of spaces and conceptualised by a varied range of actors.

This workshop brings together historical and wider humanities approaches to being and acting as a late modern ‘patient.' It draws on material, institutional, biosocial, and philosophical perspectives and is organised through ongoing work at Uppsala University’s Centre for Medical Humanities on patienthood across historical contexts and academic disciplines. This interdisciplinary research asks how ‘being’ a patient changed since the nineteenth century and how these changes are connected to new technologies, institutions, social relationships, and forms of political consciousness. Building on this research, the workshop explores the reciprocal, divergent, and sometimes contradictory identities of being and acting as a patient in late modernity.

The concrete aim of the workshop is to develop the idea of the ‘patient’ as a ‘trading zone’ (Galison, 1997). In employing Galison’s term, the workshop interrogates its applicability to patient research in two ways. First, we approach ‘trading zones’ as an analytic category of patient identity – how have patients mobilised their own bodies and knowledges in specific times and places? How have patients been integrated into professional and technological processes? Second, we see the ‘trading zone’ as a way of drawing together a wide range of scholarship on medicine and health – how are our own theoretical and disciplinary perspectives unified and extended by treating ‘the patient’ as a common interdisciplinary object of analysis?

We are interested in papers and contributions that explore how the history of medicine and/or technology can be reworked through consideration of ‘trading zones’ in and around patients’ bodies, homes, schools, workplaces, social relationships, material and media environments, and public spaces.

We invite proposals from all disciplines within the medical humanities and adjacent fields such as sociology, law, philosophy, and similar for short papers (15-20 minutes) on a range of themes connected to the patient. These could include, but are by no means limited to:

• Patients as citizens;
• Patients as activists;
• Patients as employers, employees, and laborers;
• Patients as consumers;
• Patients as (self-)advocates;
• Patients as researchers and research subjects;
• Patients as users/ergonomists;
• Patients as administrators;
• Patients as technologies and users of technologies

Opening and concluding roundtables will open up these discussions to the questions ‘What do we get from thinking about the patient in these different ways?’ and ‘How helpful is it to conceptualise the patient as a fluid and unsettled entity?’

Please apply by submitting a short bio, title, and abstract of no more than 300 words before 1 March, 2025.