Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilisation

Through the Looking Glass, Vogue (December 2003) © Annie Leibowitz. Image Source.

The University of Hull in the UK is holding a conference on 13-14 September 2012 entitled, Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilisation. The researchers there are clearly still interested in a fad that has been popular in academic history in the 2000s, the so-called 'history of the body.' Beyond that, they evidently see global society as sick, in part because of its radical recent technological transformation and rapid explosion of communications; and they feel that these maladies are equally evident at microcosmic individual levels and on a macrocosmic social scale:

This conference focuses on the social pathologies of contemporary civilisation, i.e., on the ways in which contemporary malaises, diseases, illnesses, anxieties and psycho-somatic syndromes are related to cultural pathologies of the social body, how disorders of the collective esprit de corps of contemporary society manifest at the level of individual bodies, and how the social body and bodies politic are related to the hegemony of reductive biomedical and individual-psychological perspectives.

The central research hypothesis guiding the conference is that many contemporary problems of health and well-being are to be understood in the light of radical changes of social structures and institutions, extending to deep crises in our civilisation as a whole. A particular focus of the conference is the role of humanities and social sciences, particularly sociology, philosophy and anthropology, in helping to understand the connection between individual and collective experiences of social transformations and of health and well-being.