4th Biannual Conference Social Sciences & Health Innovations: Multiplicities, May 23-25, 2019, Tomsk, Russia.

Dear all, 
 
We would like to invite you to participate in the 4th Biannual Conference Social Sciences & Health Innovations: Multiplicities, which will be held on May 23-25, 2019, in Tomsk, Russia.
Submission deadline is 15 December 2018. 
 
Currently, we can observe a problematic tendency: efforts to innovate for health often avoid engaging with multiplicity. First, humans are often singled out as being exceptional among other species, with everything else viewed as a risk of threat to human health. Phenomena like mutual dependence and living together are not very well understood, despite that any single organism is always embedded in networks of ecological interactions. Second, the human body(as well as a patient) is expected to be universal. Yet, scholars like Margaret Lock and Maurizio Meloni have highlighted biosocial processes that over time produce what has been called ‘local biologies’. Third, diseases are often conceived as stable, discrete, and pre-given entities. Yet, the work of John Law and Vicky Singleton, among others, points to the contrary. They demonstrated, for example, that foot and mouth disease was enacted as many different things during an outbreak in Britain: in veterinary practice it was symptoms like blisters and fever; in the virological laboratory it was the antibodies binding to specific antigens, and in epidemiological research it was a condition that spreads through a susceptible population. Finally, evidence of what works tends to be assessed in terms of one clear hierarchy based on statistical norms regarding what counts as reliable knowledge. However, scholars like Vololona Rabeharisoa, Tiago Moreira, and Madeleine Akrich have discussed the appropriateness of different kinds of evidence for different kinds of questions and the evidentiary value of experiences of living with health conditions.
So, while species, bodies, diseases, and knowledges are multiple, the notion of multiplicity is mostly avoided in health care, governance, and sciences, where the strive for uniformity and best practices sometimes comes at the expense of applicability in specific local settings, and of sensitivity to the uncertain consequences of decisions and interventions.
This conference invites participants to discuss the notion of multiplicity and to engage with a diverse range of multiplicities that are too often bracketed in attempts to understand and address health problems and health innovations. How can multiplicity be conceptualized? How can concepts of multiplicity inspire productive ways of dealing with health problems? How can we account for and engage with the complexes of many species living together? How can novel health technologies relate to the multiple realities where diseases are practiced differently?
We welcome both individual paper proposals and proposals for closed thematic panels. Please submit your applications via the electronic form by 15 December 2018. 
The submission forms can be found here (https://www.conftool.org/multiplicities2019/index.php?page=index) . If you have any questions you can contact the conference organizers: healthinnovations2019@gmail.com.
Individual paper submissions should include a title limited to 10 words, abstract up to 600 words including references, and author(s)’ biography. To assist the program chairs in grouping the papers into sessions, please add three keywords.
Panel proposals should include a title, panel description (up to 300 words), panel convenor(s)’ biography, and a list of panel speakers (not more than 6 panelists) with their affiliations and titles of the panel presentations. Other formats of participation as exhibitions, roundtables etc. are welcomed.
Registration fee: 50 euro
Conference speakers: 
·       Vololona Rabeharisoa, Professor of Sociology, Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines-ParisTech, Paris, France; author of many contributions on the increasing involvement of civil society organizations in scientific and technical activities
·       Maurizio Meloni, Associate Professor of Sociology, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia; co-editor of the recent Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society and Biosocial Matters: Rethinking Biology-Sociology Relationships
·       Yan Vlasov, Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Samara State Medical University, Russia; Chair of the Patient Protection Council and Co-chair of the Russian Patients Union, Russia
Special online contribution by Annemarie Mol, Professor of Anthropology of the Body, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; author of books The Logic of Care and The Body Multiple.
The language of the Conference: English 
Regards,
Lyubov Torlopova,
Research fellow at PAST-centre, Tomsk State University
My recently published articles are available here: https://tsu-ru.academia.edu/LyubovTorlopova