‘Cruel Health’ Workshop Series
Event | ‘Cruel Health’ Workshop Series
Dates: 12 April 2024, 31 May 2024, 25 October 2024, 29 November 2024
Location: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Organizers: Max Casey, dr. Erin La Cour, dr. Joyce Lammerichs
Contact & Registration: m.r.casey@vu.nl
Credits: 1 ECTS
The Cruel Health workshop series starts from the premise that there is more to health than emotional and physical (self-)regulation. In bringing Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” together with healthcare discourse, it proposes that rather than seeing healthcare as a process of acclimatizing disabled and ill subjects to the violence and inherent coloniality of medical capitalism, we must reframe our understandings of both health and care. Over four sessions, national and international experts will offer lectures and workshops on health and care that exist beyond and/or against the confines of traditional medicine, including decolonial health, anti-psychiatry and mad studies, artistic intervention, and medical capitalism. The workshop series aims to attract those working in the medical humanities, medicine, the arts, and interdisciplinary studies across various faculties.
Each workshop will be an afternoon-long event, and will feature two academics in dialogue with each other. The workshop will be primarily directed by the speakers, with an emphasis on interactive engagement with the themes and concepts developed in the lectures. The workshop has been funded through the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s CLUE+ Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage, and organized in collaboration with the PULSE network for the Medical and Health Humanities (http://www.pulsenetwork.nl/).
Individual Workshop Sessions
· April 12, 13:00-18:00 – Decolonial Health and Medicine
o Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken (UvA) and Dr. Kelechi Anucha (Durham)
· May 31, 13:00-18:00 – Anti-Psychiatry and Madness
o Wouter Kusters and Grietje Keller
· October 25, 13:00-18:00 – Trans Health and Sexuality
o Diego Semerene (UVA) and Alison Rumfitt
· November 29, 13:00-18:00 – Medical Capitalism and Criticality
o Raluca Soreanu and Sonia de Jager
Credit Requirements
Students are provided with the opportunity to earn 1 ECTS in two ways:
- Preparation and attendance of two sessions with short, 200-word response papers for each.
- Preparation and attendance of a single session with a longer, 750-word response paper.