CfP: 12th Medical Anthropology Young Scholars Annual Meeting

The pandemic has been a world-shattering phenomenon, a single event that has so clearly affected all societies across the globe. Even as vaccinations against COVID-19 are being administrated in many countries worldwide, health experts are unable to predict when the pandemic will end. Going forward, we will all continue to contend to changes it brought to the many registers of everyday life globally. Anthropology – a discipline that changes with the world in which it engages – must too adjust accordingly.

As COVID-19 dominates academic research and funding, challenging our work, we invite student and early-career researchers from across the social sciences to join us in a discussion on the effects and affects of the pandemic within fieldworks and disciplines.

We invite:

1.  Reflexive pieces that dwell on methodological changes in response to the pandemic in the different phases (whether in planning a project, implementation during fieldwork, or post-fieldwork analysis, or others), focus on disciplinary changes, including the praxis of conducting fieldworks, and consequences of the overbearingfocus on the pandemic within social sciences - what contributions can, and should, anthropology be making in living in a post-pandemic world?
2. Ethnographic papers on the different ways the pandemic has affected fieldworks, research focuses, research participants, and researchers themselves - papers that document how everyday life has, or has not, changed during the pandemic in our respective field sites.
3. Theory-oriented pieces that take on the new and old theoretical engagements emerging as we try to come to grips with the effect of the pandemic on everyday life, recognizing changes that took place and advocating for changes that must take place.

In 2021 we are dedicating the Annual MAYS Meeting to an issue that we see as pressing to all of social sciences in the post/pandemic times. As such, we encourage submissions from graduate students and early-career scholars in medical anthropology and related fields, as well as from those who locate themselves at the periphery, but were forced by the circumstances to engage with health-related social sciences. Comparative pieces on the before and after of the pandemic are particularly welcome. 

The meeting will be held in Warsaw, after exactly 10 years since the last MAYS meeting took place in the capitol city of Poland. The event will, most likely, be hybrid – combining both the online and the offline, if the circumstances allow. Provisional dates for the meeting are August 19th – 21st 2021.

Application process
We invite you to submit an abstract of no more than 350-500 words at this link by March 31st, 2021. After the notification of acceptance (April 15th), you will be asked to submit a paper of
no more than 3,000 words by July 5th, 2020. Each workshop participant will be paired with a discussant with whom they will share their paper prior to the meeting. 

Submit your abstract here

More information about MAYS can be found here.

Participation fee
In order to cover basic expenses, we will ask for 10 EUR participation fee for the in-person meeting (pandemic permitting), to be paid upon arrival in Warsaw.

Financial support
As we are planning for the event to be a hybrid one, we will try to provide travel reimbursements to all EASA members taking part in the Annual Meeting. More information pending on availability and amount of travel bursaries.

Important dates
31.03.2021 – Deadline for 350-500 words abstracts, to be submitted here
15.04.2021 – Notification of acceptance
05.07.2021 – Deadline for submitting conference papers
19-21.08.2021 – Annual Meeting