Since the 1980s, scholars in the interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities have foregrounded how the distinction between ‘disease’, i.e. the medical classification of symptoms, and the individual experience of illness can be generative to unlock the tensions within the medical encounter. The doctor and the patient may tell two very different stories of illness, even contradictory ones. The mismatch that often arises between the medical gaze (Michel Foucault, 1963). and the individual’s gaze in the face of the same event can be productively addressed by paying attention to their visual and narrative representations. In addition, the ways diseases have been portrayed with words and images have also affected the (self)perception of the body through history. If medicine is about stories (the patients’, doctors’, science’s, society’s), when and where do conflicts and misunderstandings arise that turn the cure into something perceived as violence? Literary and visual narratives contribute to sharing these stories and can offer a vantage point to address larger cultural scripts. How do these narratives represent perceptions of violence within medical settings and practices?
The two-day symposium seeks to address the ambiguities of and tensions among perceptions at the cusp of internal (subjective) and external (social, cultural, political) ‘gazes’. What the individual experiences, at either end of the consultation room, is a complex interlacing of personal vicissitudes, global structures, and community practices: a prismatic network in which ‘care’ and ‘violence’ are reflected and refracted in a variety of oftentimes overlapping and divergent interpretative modes. Communities (whether concrete, virtual, or imagined) can be perceived as both providers of care and support, as well as instigators of violence. A case in point mirroring this ambiguity are for instance online pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia communities, where users create a space to share their experiences of eating disorders while at the same time promoting self-disruptive food behaviours. Another telling example is constituted by the outcomes of the ongoing pandemic; the alliance of extreme right-wing movements with anti-vaxers, and the protests against governments’ covid-related sanitary measures or the green pass (dubbed a ‘sanitary dictatorship’) have exposed the infiltration of radical ideologies and conspiracies into medical discourse, whereby care and violence lose their neat distinction. While a black and white opposition between internal/external, care/neglect, cure/violence may seem reductionist, engagement with these seemingly contrasting attitudes reveals the complex entanglements among possible scientific dogmatic drifts, social inequalities within healthcare systems, and idiosyncratic projections of individual and collective fears, which often lead to stigmatizing certain collectivities for the origin or transmission of contagious diseases (Zhao Xun and Sander L. Gilman, 2021).
In English
10:00 Introduction
10:15 – 11:45 Workshop I: On Biopolitics
Xenia Chiaramonte (ICI Berlin)
Bio-History. Michel Foucault and the History of Social Medicine
Federico Dal Bo (University of Heidelberg)
Politics in the Time of Cholera. Covid, Table Manners, and Bio-Politics
Manuela Kölke (European Graduate School)
Bearing Life. Anthropological Critiques of Survival
11:45 – 12:15: Coffee Break
12:15 – 13:45 Workshop II: Clinical Encounters
Avril Tynan (University of Turku)
What the Patient Doesn’t Say. Against Interpretative Violence in Narrative Medicine
Silvia Pierosara (University of Macerata)
Scenes of Care. Narratives as too Fragile Bulwarks against Violence
Ashwak Sam Hauter (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Physicians or Prophets? Affinity and Alghayb in the Hospital
13:45 – 15:30 Lunch Break
16:00 – 18:00 Roundtable: On Violence, Care, Cure (Livestream available)
Elizabeth Punzi (Gothenburg University)
Heike Bartel (University of Nottingham)
Mita Banerjee (University of Mainz)
Angela Woods (Durham University)
Daniele Lorenzini (University of Warwick)
19:00 Online Lecture Sander L. Gilman (Livestream available)
Let’s Talk about Vaccination:
Violence, Care, Risk in the Age of COVID-19
10:00 – 12:00 Workshop III: Questioning Healing
Lena Ditte Nissen (Kunstuniversität Linz)
Chaosmos of the Personal. The Ethno-psychoanalytic Method of the ‘Interpretation Workshop’ Within Artistic Research on Female Role Models in National Socialism
Vera Mader (Ruhr University Bochum)
‘My friend and Heilpraktiker’. Audre Lorde, German Naturopathy, and Environmental Healing in the Late 20th Century
Lisa Schmidt-Herzog (IMGWF Universität zu Lübeck)
Non-Reception as Violence. Frantz Fanon and the Poetization of Science
Rachel Pafe (Independent Researcher)
Plumbing the Perpetual Loss of Paradise. Susan Taubes and Sacred Suffering
12:00 – 13:30 Lunch Break
13:30 – 14:30 Workshop IV: Cinematic Patients
Sophia Rohwetter (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)
Relational Encounters. Articulations of Radical Psychiatry in Alberto Grifi’s Anthropology of Disobedience
Hannah Parlett (University of Cambridge)
Pedro Almodóvar’s Anatomical Venus
14:35 – 16:05 Workshop V: Being Trans and Non-Binary in the Medical Environment
Claude Kempen (SOAS, University of London)
Mind the Gap! Non-Binary Transition and the Medical Encounter
Myriam Sauer (Independent Researcher)
A Kinaesthesia in Ruins. Dysphoria as Psychic Dehiscence
G. Melville (Durham University)
For a New Trans-Individual. Bernard Stiegler and the Technicalities of Gendered Care
16:05 – 16.35 Coffee Break
16:35 – 18:05 Workshop VI: Art Work and Medical Care
Nora Heidorn (Royal College of Art London)
Touching Matters of Care. A Visual Approach to the Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes’ Birth Control Campaign
Maria Morata (Independent Curator and Researcher)
I Am Not My MRI
Ruth Noack (Former Executive Director of The Corner at Whitman-Walker), Britt Walsh (Whitman-Walker Health, Washington)
Small Indignities. Envisioning an Exhibition on Some of the Inequities in Trans-Healthcare
18:05 – 18:30 Final Remarks
Organized by
Clio Nicastro and Marta-Laura Cenedese
The symposium is co-funded by the ICI Berlin, the VolkswagenStiftung, the Centre Marc Bloch, and the Nordic Summer University.

Image credit © Claudia Peppel, ‘Who’s afraid of…?’, 2013 (collage, detail)