AAG CFP 2025: Health in Crisis
Detroit, March 24-28, 2025
Organizers: Mohammed Rafi Arefin (UBC), Mollie Holmberg (UBC), Vanessa Koetz (Queen’s), Carolyn Prouse (Queen’s)
In recent years a variety of health emergencies, from toxic drug crisis to pandemics of infectious disease, have cascaded to transform the status quo. Since the 1990s, scientists, policymakers, and others have increasingly drawn the public’s attention to the health threats posed by emerging diseases (see Committee on Emerging Microbial Threats 1992, Garrett 1994, Morse 1993, Preston 1994). In the past two decades alone, the world has seen major outbreaks of SARS, H5N1, H1N1, MERS-CoV, Ebola, Zika, SARS-CoV-2, and the re-emergence of Polio and MPox. Meanwhile, and relatedly, climate change induced extreme weather is exposing the health inequalities baked into our built environments and social infrastructures (Hamstead 2023). The World Meteorological Association, for example, reports that “extreme heat causes [the] greatest mortality of all extreme weather events/hazards” (2023). Environmental toxicity and hazards produced by industrial and consumer waste as well as war also pose increasingly severe health threats to communities globally (Liboiron 2020, Pellow 2017). And the toxic drug crisis from British Columbia to North Carolina is devastating communities as each year mortality numbers increase. In BC alone since the province declared this crisis a public health emergency in 2016 more than 14,000 have died from the toxic supply of unregulated and lucrative drugs.
Geographers have met recent moments of contemporary crisis through the refinement of conjunctural geographical analysis. While generally not explicitly focused on health, scholars developing conjunctural analysis have carefully traced the forceful sharpening of historical political-economic and social tensions and contradictions that give rise to seemingly intractable local and global dilemmas (Hart 2023, Hall 1980, Peck 2023). This mode of analysis focuses on the “coming together of social and political forces to establish hegemonic regimes” (Doshi & Ranganathan 2016, p. 16) at particular space-times, with attention to the historical, geographically expansive, and multiscalar relations that conjoin, or articulate, economic systems, cultural ideologies, state formations, and everyday life (Hall & Massey, 2010; Leitner & Sheppard, 2020; Prouse, 2021). Such conjunctural analysis involves, in the words of Jamie Peck (2016, p. 6), an “orthogonal methodological maneuver” of “spiralling up and down through cases and contexts,” recognizing “contextual complexity ‘all the way down’” in the pursuit of midlevel conceptualizations.
This session is driven by the question: what can a conjunctural analysis bring to understanding health in crisis and, in turn, what do geographies of health bring to refining the methods of conjunctural analysis?
Recent conjunctural analyses of health-related crises have shown, for instance, the relational entwining of different places as articulated conjunctures of bio-pharma hub production (Sparke, Malmberg & Malpass, 2023); and the conjunctural hegemonies of biocapital, infectious disease crisis, and surveillance capitalism that have made wastewater surveillance a lucrative endeavour for biotech (Arefin & Prouse, forthcoming)
Inspired by the Gramscian-Hall lineage of conjunctural methodology, we are particularly interested in conjunctural analyses of health (crisis) that show the intertwining of economic interests with other social orderings such as racialization processes, cultural histories, gendered forms of labour, and common sense ‘truths’ of science and religion (to name only a few potential articulations) that shape both health crises and responses to them – responses that can range from the neocolonial and neoliberal to the revolutionary. Such analyses, as Doreen Massey and Stuart Hall (2010) note, can identify how to intervene in crisis conjunctures in ways that help deconstruct and overthrow hegemonies, unequal social hierarchies, and everyday commonsenses that are deeply imbricated in economic systems
Infectious disease, the health impacts of climate change, and the crisis of toxic drugs are only three of many intractable problems that characterize this moment of health crisis. But these crises illuminate the need for an analysis that moves beyond the proximate causes and places the problem in conjunctural forces.
Possible themes include:
- Housing and health
- Disasters and health
- War, military, and health
- Political economy of toxic hazards and health
- Austerity and the financialization of public health
- Settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and health
- The political economy and ecology of biosecurity and biosurveillance
- Inequalities in the production and distribution of therapeutics
- Biotechnology and the privatization of health data
- Carceral responses to health crisis
Please submit abstracts of 300 words to Carolyn Prouse ([email protected]) and Vanessa Koetz ([email protected]) by Oct 15th. We are hoping to have one in-person and one virtual session, so please indicate with your submission which you would prefer.
We are happy to answer any questions you have in the meantime!
Take care,
Rafi, Mollie, Vanessa, and Carolyn
Bibliography
Committee on Emerging Microbial Threats to Health. (1992). Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States. National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.17226/2008
Doshi S & Ranganathan M (2017). Contesting the unethical city: Land dispossession and corruption narratives in urban India. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107(1): 183-199.
Garrett, L (1994). The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York, USA: Penguin Books
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Hall S & Massey D (2010). Interpreting the crisis. Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 44: 57-71.
Hamstead, Z. (2023). Critical Heat Studies: Deconstructing Heat Studies for Climate Justice. Planning Theory & Practice 2(24): 153-172.
Hart, G. (2023). Modalities of Conjunctural Analysis: “Seeing the Present Differently” through Global Lenses. Antipode, 56(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12975
Leitner, H. & Sheppard, E. (2020). Towards an epistemology for conjunctural inter-urban comparison. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 13(3): 491-508.
Liboiron, M. (2020) Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press.
Morse, S. S. (Ed.). (1993). Emerging Viruses. Oxford University Press.
Peck, J. (2023). Variegated Economies. Oxford University Press.
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Pellow, D.N. (2017). What is Critical Environmental Justice? Wiley.
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Prouse, C. (2021). Articulating corruption of infrastructural upgrading projects in Rio de Janeiro. Political Geography (84): 102305.
Sparke, M., Malmberg, E., Malpass, T. (2023). Bio-pharma hub development in global production networks: Contrasting state policies and conjunctural value strategies. Area Development and Policy Online First https://doi.org/10.1080/23792949.2023.2216258
World Meteorological Association (2023). Climate change is bad for health but climate services save lives. Retrieved from https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/climate-change-bad-health-climate-services-save-lives