Name: The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop
Start: 2024-05-30T16:00:00+01:00
End: 2024-05-31T17:00:00+01:00
Location: Queen Mary University of London

The geography of pain: an interdisciplinary workshop

Researchers and practitioners will explore the spatial, social, environmental, and embodied geographies of pain and anaesthetics
About this Event

About the workshop

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. Interventions will require minimal preparation.

The second part of the workshop (Friday, 31 May 2024, 9:00 - 17:00) will focus on the relationship between pain, global capitalism, space, and nature. We invite short research papers on ongoing academic work across disciplines.

For more information or to submit papers for the second part of the workshop, contact Dr Archie Davies at [email protected]. Deadline for abstracts: 27th March 2024.

The event will take place at QMUL. Location to be confirmed.

In association with the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) and the School of Geography, QMUL.

The workshop is supported by the IHSS Large Grant Seed-corn Funding Scheme.

Image source:

Unnamed model. The Physiognomy of Pain, Plate II. Fear by A. Mosso. translated from the 5th edition of the Italian by E. Lough and F. Kiesow. copyright Wikimedia Commons / Wellcome Images.