Conference Review
'Classification', 'Identity' and 'The Body'
13 June 2008
The Health and Welfare Symposium was held on 13 June 2008. This
one-day workshop was organised by the Health and Welfare Research
Group, which was established as one of the CRASSH-supported
Graduate-Faculty Research Groups in October 2007. The interdisciplinary
symposium was designed to bring together researchers working on diverse
aspects of health and welfare. In particular, the workshop aimed to
showcase on-going research by postgraduate and early-career research
fellows in Cambridge and to promote academic exchange and future
collaboration.
The symposium focused on three themes - 'Classification', 'Identity'
and 'The Body'. These topics had been the subject of the seminar and
reading-group programme held during the academic year 2007-8. These
reading groups and seminars had allowed participants to begin exploring
these themes, and the Symposium was designed to build on these earlier
discussions. Nine papers and three posters were presented by
postgraduate and early-career researchers. Professor Joanna Bourke
(Birkbeck, University of London) gave the keynote lecture, entitled
‘Sexual violence and trauma theory: a history’ to draw these themes
together at the end of the workshop.
Over 40 delegates attended the Symposium, of whom three-quarters were
based within the University of Cambridge. Their disciplinary
backgrounds were highly diverse, with participants drawn from at least
13 different departments within the University, ranging from public
health to history, and from law to psychology.
The Symposium was successful at generating genuinely interdisciplinary
conversations. Central to these discussions were comparisons between
places, times and contexts in which human health and welfare have been
discussed, including medieval France, early twentieth-century England,
modern South Africa, and, especially, contemporary Britain.
Interactions between the state, health-care professionals, civil
society and the individual were a focus of many of the presentations.
Papers elucidated the diversity of conceptualisations of well-being,
and many explored the implications of these ideas for public policy and
practices of health care.
Thanks to the generosity of CRASSH, the Health and Welfare Research
Group will extend and expand its programme of events for the academic
year 2008-9. The Group will continue to organise a fortnightly seminar
programme, which will focus on the themes of death and tissue transfer;
the medicalisation of deviance; and, care and vulnerability,
culminating in a conference in summer 2009. We will also help to
convene a workshop in qualitative research methods, which will allow
researchers working in clinical medicine, the social sciences and the
humanities to explore methodologies for investigating and understanding
health and welfare. By creating a space for intellectual interchange –
through seminars, reading groups, a database of researchers, workshops
and conferences – we hope that the Symposium can be part of the first
stage of long-term interdisciplinary collaboration and fruitful
discussion on a wide range of topics relating to health and welfare.
