mardi 23 décembre 2025

Vacances hivernales


Le blogue entre dans sa période de vacances hivernales. Il sera de retour le lundi 5 janvier 2026


Bon temps des fêtes ! 



dimanche 21 décembre 2025

Les corps défavorisés

Underprivileged Bodies: Marginality and Minority in Europe, 1850–1939



Call for Papers



The organizing committee invites proposals for papers for the upcoming conference “Underprivileged Bodies: Marginality and Minority in Europe, 1850–1939”, to be held on July 6–8, 2026, at the Department of Jewish Studies, Wrocław University.

From the rise of industry to the emergence of racial science and eugenics, from the expansion of empires to the contestation of class, gender, and disability norms—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a profound transformation in the ways bodies were perceived, categorized, and regulated. This transformation was driven by the increasing entanglement of state power, medical knowledge, and culture in the definition of bodily norms and the disciplining of deviant bodies. Scientific discourses strove to codify human difference, often along biological or racial lines; social institutions—from schools and hospitals to asylums and prisons—intervened in the everyday lives of the young, the poor, the sick, and the deviant; and both popular and elite, textual and visual cultures became invested in delineating the “fit” and “unfit,” the “civilized” and the “primitive,” the “normal” and the “abnormal.”

This conference seeks to explore how marginalized and minority bodies were imagined, categorized, and governed in Europe between 1850 and 1939, as well as how individuals and communities experienced, performed, and contested these regimes of representation and control. We welcome papers that address a broad range of minorities—including ethnic, religious, gender, class, age, sexual, and disabled communities—but we place particular emphasis on the Jewish body as a key site of modern European anxieties, fantasies, and negotiations. We are also interested in exploring diversity within Jewish society itself, including the experiences of Jewish women, children, the poor, migrants, or religious and cultural sub-groups who were subject to multiple layers of marginalization.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):
  • Visual and scientific representations of Jewish and other minority bodies—by the minorities themselves or through dominant discourses
  • Minority and marginalized bodies in institutional settings: prisons, asylums, schools, hospitals, poorhouses
  • Gendered and queer embodiments
  • Jewish laboring bodies: class, migration, gender, occupation
  • Public health campaigns, hygiene discourses, and the surveillance of Jewish and other minority bodies
  • Narratives and experiences of illness, disability, and corporeal difference in Jewish and non-Jewish communities
  • Embodiments of childhood, adolescence, and old age in minority contexts
  • Jewish and other minority bodies in imperial and transimperial settings: the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires
  • Comparative or transnational approaches to marginal bodies across European regions, states, or empires

The geographical scope of our interest includes eastern, central, and southern Europe, including the Balkans. We particularly encourage contributions that foreground Jewish experiences while situating them in broader comparative, transnational, or interdisciplinary frameworks.

Submission Guidelines:

Please send a 300-word abstract along with a short bio (max 200 words) to the email underprivilegedbodies@gmail.com by January, 15, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 28, 2026.

For questions, please contact Dr. Ekaterina Oleshkevich at ekaterina.oleshkevich@mail.huji.ac.il or Dr. Zuzanna Kołodziejska-Smagała at zuzanna.kolodziejska-smagala@uwr.edu.pl.

The conference is organized with the support of the Department of Jewish Studies, Wrocław University, and Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

samedi 20 décembre 2025

Les territoires de la génétique

Les territoires de la génétique : nouvelles perspectives



Appel à communication 

 

Journées 2026 de la Shesvie

Paris, du 20 au 22 mai


A côté de l’ « industrie darwinienne », la génétique est le second grand domaine des sciences de la vie à avoir donné lieu à une historiographie abondante depuis les années 1960-1970 et l’institutionnalisation de l’histoire de la biologie, comme en attestent par exemple les entrées du Journal of the History of Biology. Cela a conduit à un enrichissement considérable de nos connaissances pour ce qui concerne les sujets les plus essentiels, comme par exemple (sans souci d’exhaustivité) : la place qui revient aux travaux de Mendel et le contexte de leur « redécouverte » en 1900 ; l’essor de la génétique dite classique au cours de la première décennie du XXe siècle ; l’établissement de la théorie chromosomique de l’hérédité ; l’eugénisme ; la fondation de la génétique moléculaire. Beaucoup de ces travaux ont en outre été conduits avec une perspective comparatiste, ce qui a permis de révéler des « styles » locaux dans la façon dont la génétique s’est développée tout au long du siècle dernier.

En parallèle de cet approfondissement continu des connaissances historiographiques, on constate également, au cours de la même période (1970-présent), le développement d’un discours nettement plus critique et normatif envers la génétique, porté par de nombreuses disciplines des sciences humaines. La génétique a non seulement été prise pour objet, elle aura également été prise à partie. Dans le domaine de la philosophie des sciences, le concept de gène a ainsi donné lieu à de multiples critiques, et il y a eu des philosophes pour pronostiquer sa désuétude prochaine et le bien-fondé de sa suppression (Keller 2003). De la même manière, le « géno-centrisme » de la théorie de l’évolution a lui aussi été l’objet d’une littérature aussi foisonnante qu’hétérogène (comme en attestent les nombreux travaux en lien avec l’ « Extended Evolutionary Synthesis »). Ces critiques répétées du réductionnisme génétique n’ont pas été sans effet sur l’historiographie elle-même dans sa façon d’envisager ce qu’a été la naissance (mendélienne) de la génétique (Radick 2023). Ce faisant, il semble qu’on oublie que si le XXe siècle a bien été le siècle du gène, c’est d’abord parce que la génétique a profondément transformé la plupart des disciplines biologiques, à la manière de la théorie cellulaire au XIXe siècle.

L’objet de cette journée d’étude (20 mai), et au-delà la thématique retenue pour le congrès de la SHESVIE (21-22 mai), sera d’explorer, dans toute leur richesse et épaisseur historienne, les territoires (théoriques et empiriques) effectivement transformés par l’approche génétique. Ceux-ci, comme nous le verrons, ont été fort divers, ce qui explique que la génétique soit très souvent une science qui appelle la qualification de son domaine de mise au travail : génétique moléculaire, génétique du développement, génétique des populations, génétique humaine, etc. En cela, le concept de gène semble bien avoir fonctionné comme celui de cellule à la fin du XIXe siècle, lorsqu’il y eut quelque chose comme une « cellularisation » des disciplines biologiques : l’anatomie, la physiologie et l’embryologie (entre autres) sont devenues cellulaires à ce moment. C’est très probablement un mouvement de cet ordre auquel on assiste tout au long du XXe siècle et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, mouvement général dont il s’agit de réactiver le sens sur la base de multiples études spéciales.



Nous attendons vos propositions d’interventions (500 mots) pour le 30 janvier 2026 (contact@shesvie.fr), aussi bien sur la thématique des territoires de la génétique qu’en varia.


Keller E.F., 2003, Le siècle du gène, Paris, Gallimard.

Radick G., 2023, Disputed Inheritance, The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.

vendredi 19 décembre 2025

Contagion, information et territoire

Contagion, Information, Territory

Call for papers   


Time and Place: Leiden University, 17–19 June 2026

Keynote speakers: Dr. Ramon Amaro (Design Academy Eindhoven) and Prof. Dr. Jasbir Puar (University of British Columbia)


As new forms of exclusion and colonialism are emerging and old apartheid policies reinvigorated, the movement of people, the spread of disease, and the circulation of information become ever more central to our understanding of war, politics, identity, and government. The war in Gaza and illegal occupation in the West Bank are a case in point. This conflict is not just
territorial, it is informational, and the Israeli government employs strategies of withholding care and barring humanitarian aid to preemptively immunize Israel’s cultural and legal self-perception as a ‘uniquely’ Jewish nation-state, against Palestinian life. As the international movement of trans* and queer people is restricted in ways that bring to mind the late 20th
century response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, gender and sex education are thought of as ‘infecting’ children with particular sexual preferences, or encouraging trans* identification in them. Meanwhile, the language of contagion is activated politically and by opposing factions. Where some speak of a “woke mind virus,” others attempt to make sense of fascist protests like the January 6th attack on the Capitol in 2020, or the 2025 extreme rightwing riots in The Hague, the Netherlands, as fueled by viral online discourse and contagious hatred of immigrants.

In response to these concerns, contagion, information, and territory emerge as central concepts of political analysis and critical thought. We invite paper proposals reflecting on the connection between these concepts, and their relationship to contemporary processes of technological, political, cultural, and social subjection, abjection, and debilitation, through cultural and artistic objects.

Responses might encompass, but are not limited to:
  • Metaphors of disease in relation to data and territoriality.
  • Neoliberal governmentality, borders, and racialized data.
  • Technologies and models of preemption, prediction, and inoculation.
  • Necropolitics, data, and immunity in its territorial and biomedical inflections.
  • Cultural imaginaries and histories of technologized futures and territories.
  • War, occupation, and apartheid in relation to information, territory, and contagion.
  • Debility and debilitation as endemic biopolitical strategies.
  • Insurance, financialized capital, and techno-libertarianism.
  • Infection and contagion in relation to BIPOC, queer, and trans* stigmatization and movement.
  • Biosecurity, border regimes, and the management of virality (HIV/AIDS, bird flu, BSE, Zika, etc.)

We welcome submissions on these themes across fields and disciplines. Please submit abstracts for 20-minute presentations of 250 to 300 words, along with brief biographical notes (about 50 words) to contagious.territories@hum.leidenuniv.nl by January 31, 2026. We especially encourage queer, BIPOC, disabled, working class, and other marginalized scholars to apply.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 28, 2026. Please note that attendance at this conference will be in-person ONLY. See Full CFP attached or the website (https://contagiousterritories.org/conference.html) for further information. If you have any questions, please contact us at contagious.territories@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Contact Information
Ilios Willemars, Dong Xia, Maaike Hommes

Contact Email
contagious.territories@hum.leidenuniv.nl


jeudi 18 décembre 2025

Les médecines dans le monde ibéro-américain

Between Institutionalized Medicine and Popular Medicine: Circulation of Practices, Knowledges, and 
Agents in the Ibero-American World, Sixteenth–Twentieth Centuries

Call for papers


Historia Crítica, a journal published by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), announces a call for papers for its thematic issue “Between Institutionalized Medicine and Popular Medicine: Circulation of Practices, Knowledges, and Agents in the Ibero-American World, Sixteenth-Twentieth Centuries.” This issue will feature the participation of Dr. Astrid Dahhur (IICS-UCA, Argentina), Dr. Mariano Di Pasquale (IEH-UNTREF/Conicet, Argentina), and Dr. Lisette Varón Carvajal (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) as editors.

Articles will be received from February 1 to March 15, 2026.

Estimated publication date: No. 103, 2027

This thematic issue explores the circulation of medical practices and knowledges in Ibero-America from the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. The goal is to examine the various forms of dialogue, cooperation, and tension between institutional medicine and so-called popular medicine. We welcome submissions that analyze, from a situated perspective, both the development of different healing practices and the diverse actors involved as their producers and consumers. This dossier aims to contribute to the recent historiographical shift that, instead of studying the professionalization of medicine and the practice of popular medicine as separate paths, has demonstrated that these have never been clearly distinct spheres. Instead, they have historically been part of a dynamic knowledge circulation and feedback system.

This dossier rejects teleological views that endorse narratives of linear and inevitable progress toward the institutionalization of medical knowledge. It distances itself from perspectives that see the dissemination of science in Ibero-America as a one-way process, created in a “center” and passively adopted in the “periphery.” At the same time, it encourages a critical look at approaches that narrow the history of medicalization by excluding practitioners of popular medicine, ignoring that many of these actors continued to negotiate spaces for action and were not entirely displaced by professionals.


The broad timeframe proposed addresses the need to observe how, despite significant political, social, economic, and cultural changes that transformed health and disease management across different parts of Ibero-America, the permeability of boundaries between institutional medicine and popular medicine has remained constant. Both in early modernity and the modern era, medicine aimed to clearly define its professional scope, but it never gained complete control over what occurred at its edges or over those who crossed them.

This thematic issue proposes examining these gray areas to deepen our understanding of what has been regarded as medical knowledge and who has been recognized—or has disputed recognition—as its producers.

With the early arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas, extensive contact between different healing arts occurred. Although it is impossible to speak of cohesive and clearly delimited medical traditions as strictly “Indigenous,” “European,” or “African,” it is clear that this significant cultural encounter or clash led to an unprecedented exchange of ideas. While Europeans tried to impose order and control over forms of knowledge they deemed subordinate, the reality is that during the colonial period, a diverse group of people— doctors, surgeons, barbers, midwives, healers, and other health agents—practiced medicine (and related professions) with relative freedom and gained social recognition. This early context invites reflection on the blurry line between formal medical institutionalism and informal practices, set against a backdrop of fluidity and convergence of different ways of understanding and engaging with the world.

This diversity of knowledges and actors—what authors such as Marcos Cueto, Steven Palmer, and David Sowell have called “medical pluralism”—survived the regime change and the processes of medical professionalization that began in the second half of the eighteenth century. Later, although the second half of the nineteenth century marked a break in medical and institutional discourses when popular medicine became the “enemy to be defeated,” it persisted and adapted to new contexts. Even well into the twentieth century, a humanistic view of medicine, understood as the art of healing, continued to exist. The tension between this humanistic outlook and its growing scientific focus, which emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, represented another key moment for examining how legitimate ways of accessing knowledge were negotiated and which ones were challenged during the broad period covered by this dossier.

The thematic issue invites submissions of articles that specifically focus on some of the following topics:

• Legal action against health agents accused of practicing medicine illegally.

• Participation of popular medicine agents as medical experts in criminal and civil trials.

• Dialogue and collaboration between agents of popular medicine and those of informal medicine.

• Medical practices and health agents in rural and urban areas.

• Tensions during the medicalization process between certified and non-certified agents involved in institutions and public debates.

• The medical practices of various groups (women, Indigenous people, Afrodescendants), their relationship (coexistence, cooperation, rivalry) with formal medicine, or their experiences with the medicalization of society.

• Circulation of medical knowledges and practices related to diseases across regional, imperial, and, eventually, national borders.

• Diseases, sick people, and healthcare policies.

• Representations and discourses on institutional medicine and its counterpart, “popular” medicine, from various perspectives such as philosophy, literature, art, and anthropology.

We invite interested parties to submit unpublished articles in Spanish, English, or Portuguese.

Articles should be submitted in Word format for Windows and adhere to the Journal’s standards: a maximum length of 11,000 words (approximately 18-22 pages), 12-point Times New Roman font, single-spaced, letter size, with 3 cm margins on all sides. Author information must be provided in a separate file.

Authors must follow the Chicago Manual of Style standards adapted by the Journal for footnotes and bibliography.

Detailed manuscript submission guidelines are available at https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/index.php/hiscrit/editorial-policy

Failure to follow the submission and citation guidelines will lead to automatic rejection of the article.

Articles must be submitted via OJS using the link available on the Journal’s website during the call for papers period: https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/index.php/hiscrit/about/submissions

Articles submitted to Historia Crítica cannot be under review by another publication simultaneously.

mercredi 17 décembre 2025

La vie asilaire à Bourges et dans le Cher

Parcours de la folie : Une histoire philosophique et sociale de la psychiatrie à travers la vie asilaire à Bourges et dans le Cher 


Alain Vernet 
 
Yann Galut (Préface)


Éditeur ‏ : ‎ Editions L'Harmattan
Date de publication ‏ : ‎ 6 novembre 2025
Langue ‏ : ‎ Français
Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée ‏ : ‎ 234 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-2336557489


La psychiatrie inquiète et fascine comme tous les lieux clos, lieux de retrait de la société, abritant une population qu’on ressent comme dangereuse ou étrange, mais dont cet isolement imposé fait qu’en outre elle apparait étrangère, différente, et par conséquent a-normale. C’est le cas des malades mentaux, même si leur représentation ne fut pas toujours identique selon les époques. Malgré quelques périodes de plus grande tolérance (12 et 13e siècle, période dite des « trente glorieuses »), ils ont été le plus souvent tenus à distance, dans une forme de ségrégation, grâce à différents dispositifs : hôpitaux généraux, dépôts de mendicité, asiles d’aliénés, dont le but était de lutter contre le chaos qu’était la « folie » et ses manifestations, afin de retrouver une harmonie, à la fois ordre public extérieur, et équilibre personnel, tout ceci à travers la mise en place d’un nomos, d’un topos et d’un logos, architectures juridiques, physiques, mentales. Ce cadre général macroscopique, qui survivra jusqu’à sa déconstruction dans la deuxième moitié du 20e siècle, se déclinera en situations particulières, locales, toujours assez semblables, à quelques différences près, comme dans le département du Cher, qui servira de lieu d’observation, en quelque sorte, microscopique.

mardi 16 décembre 2025

Mardis de l'Histoire Médicale 2026

Mardis de l'Histoire Médicale 2026



Département d’Histoire des Sciences de la Vie et de la Santé
Salle 21 au 1er étage
Institut d’Anatomie Pathologique, Site de l’Hôpital Civil, Strasbourg

Pour toute information : tvicente@unistra.fr ou 03.68.85.40.78

Organisation : Tricia Close-Koenig et Marianna Scarfone

Site internet : https://dhvs.unistra.fr



27 janvier 2025 18h30-20h00

"Explorer les pratiques diagnostiques. L’introduction du concept de schizophrénie à la Clinique Psychiatrique Universitaire de Strasbourg (1920-1930)"

Julie Clauss, DHVS, Université de Strasbourg & Clinique psychiatrique, HUS


10 février 2025 18h30-20h00

"Maladies infectieuses et dermatologie coloniale : une histoire dans la longue durée (18e-20e siècle)"

Guillaume Linte, Chaire de Professeur Junior Mobimaths & MESOPOLHIS, Aix-Marseille Université / Sciences Po Aix


10 mars 2025 **19h00-20h30**

"La maladie de Crohn est-elle une maladie environnementale ? Une recherche historique des poly-expositions dans les clusters du Nord-Pas-de-Calais (1920 à nos jours)"

Léo Heuguebart, ATER, DHVS, Université de Strasbourg


24 mars 2025 18h30-20h00

"Les promesses de la modélisation animale pour comprendre les maladies humaines : hier, aujourd’hui, demain"

Héloïse Anthea, Post-doc, Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST), Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris
 

28 avril 2025 18h30-20h00

"Greffer pour redresser la structure corporelle et rétablir la bonne marche du système locomoteur, France, années 1860 - années 1920"

Tiphaine Lours, Doctorante, Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris
 

12 mai 2025 18h30-20h00


"Podcaster les cerveaux. Histoire sonore et expérience des patient.es en psychiatrie"

Jessica Schupbach, Post-doc, Institut éthique, histoire, humanités (IE2H), Université de Genève


lundi 15 décembre 2025

Faire l'histoire de la santé et de la médecine aujourd'hui

Faire l'histoire de la santé et de la médecine aujourd'hui. Objets, enjeux et méthodes


Histoire, médecine et santé, 28



Ce numéro spécial de la revue rassemble des essais rédigés par les membres du comité de rédaction. Sans souci d’exhaustivité, ils proposent plusieurs manières d’écrire l’histoire de la santé aujourd’hui. Il interroge la place des historien.nes par rapport aux autres disciplines (Léo Bernard et Hélène Leuwers). Il suggère ce que serait un musée idéal d’histoire de la médecine (Nahema Hanafi, Hervé Guillemain, Hélène Leuwers) après avoir dressé un panorama muséographique subjectif et néanmoins assez exhaustif de ce type d’institutions (Nahema Hanafi). Il questionne les manières d’écrire l’histoire de la santé autour des études de cas (Sophie Vasset et François Zanetti) et du point de vue des premier·es concernés, les malades (Claire Barillé et Philip Rieder). Il interroge les liens entre histoire de la médecine et histoire des sciences en proposant un décloisonnement des histoires disciplinaires à travers une histoire des médecins (Elisa Andretta et Rafael Mandressi). Ces articles permettront par leur approche transversale souvent inédite de nourrir la pratique historienne et offriront notamment aux jeunes chercheur·es et aux étudiant·es encore en formation le moyen de mieux situer l’état de la recherche en histoire de la médecine et de la santé aujourd’hui.


Claire Barillé et Philip Rieder
L’histoire du patient, encore ? 

Léo Bernard et Hélène Leuwers
Pratiques de l’interdisciplinarité en histoire de la médecine et de la santé. Bilan éditorial et retour d’expérience

Hervé Guillemain, Nahema Hanafi, Hélène Leuwers et Membres de la revue Histoire, médecine et santé
Le musée de la médecine idéal de la revue Histoire, médecine et santé