CfP: Challenging the dominant narratives: re-constructing migrants’ stories of health and illness through the acts of epistemic justice | IMISCOE 2024
Call for Papers for an on-site panel at the
IMISCOE Annual Conference, Lisbon, 2-5 July 2024
Panel title: Challenging the dominant narratives: re-constructing migrants’ stories of health and illness through the acts of epistemic justice
Organiser: Satrio Nindyo Istiko (Doctoral candidate, School of Public Health, University of Queensland)
Selected abstracts will be collated to develop a panel proposal for IMISCOE Annual Conference 2024. For more information about the conference, please go to https://www.imiscoe.org/events/imiscoe-events/1843-21st-imiscoe-annual-conference
Across the globe, contemporary dominant narratives of migrants tend to portray them as a threat to national security, distribution of resources, social cohesion, and cultures. These narratives maintain the racial logic that situate migrants as subjects to be controlled and managed, with significant implications for their interactions with the different systems in the host countries, including the health system. In Global North countries, migrants from the Global South are often portrayed as destitute people who need to assimilate into biomedical culture of health. Illness among diverse migrant communities is often viewed as a product of their deficit in biomedical knowledge, their perpetual challenge with the dominant language in the host countries, and their ‘inferior’ cultures as understood through the narrow lens of ethnocentricity. To challenge these dominant narratives, the acts of epistemic justice are essential as they foreground the rights of structurally marginalised people to generate, legitimise, and value knowledge about their communities. Through epistemic justice, migrants can re-construct stories that highlight complex, pluralistic understanding of health, well-being, illness, and healing. At the same time, epistemic justice demands constant reflexive practice on
the power relations between all the stakeholders involved in making research possible. This panel will showcase case studies of engagements with the concept ‘epistemic justice’ to challenge the dominant narratives of health and illness among migrants. Papers based on the studies that are conducted within critical paradigms, such as decoloniality and feminist approaches, are informed by social theories, and/or use innovative participatory methods are particularly welcomed. The panel will also endeavour to develop a community of practice for scholars working in the interdisciplinary nexus of migration-public health.
If you are interested in participating in this panel, please submit an abstract (max. 250 words) and a short biographical statement by Wednesday, 11th October 2023 at 5 PM to t.istiko@uq.edu.au. Please put: ‘Abstract – Short title of the paper – Last name’ as the email subject of your abstract submission. Outcomes of abstract screening will be announced on 13th October 2023 and the panel proposal will be submitted to the conference committee by 16th October 2023 at the latest. Please note that this panel is intended to be fully on-site which means that if the panel proposal is accepted, presenters of selected abstracts are required to attend the conference in person.