Please find full call for papers here
While geo-medicine usually links geography and health, this international conference employs geo in a geological sense and considers how geo-medical imaginaries emerge at the intersection of medical and geological events and their aftermaths, embodiments, and representations. Geological-medical imaginaries operate variously across trauma, gender, postcolonial, literary, planetary health, and Anthropocene studies, the environmental medical and health humanities. This conference examines historical and contemporary representations, formations, and critiques of syndemic “Earth events” (Clark and Szerszynski 126), primarily in—but not restricted to—the cultural, literary, and medical imagination across multiple geopolitical terrains and geological timescales. Historically, earthquakes that took place in Shaanxi, China (1556), Santiago, Chile (1647), Lisbon, Portugal (1755), Cape Ann/Boston, USA (1755), and Meknes, Morocco (1755), and, more recently, in Athens (1999), Haiti (2010), Tōhoku, Japan (2011), and Mexico City (2017) triggered tsunamis, epidemics, and nuclear accidents. Such geo-medical events generate staggering death tolls, long-term destruction, displacement, and chronic physical and mental health conditions. Read as syndemics, these events amplify pre-existing health vulnerabilities, food insecurity, and local impoverishment, while also prompting new and holistic medical and planetary health imaginaries. The latter mediate the excess of human-nonhuman relationships, the entanglement of planetary deep time and wellbeing, and modes of living with an innately dynamic planet.
Convened by the interuniversity health humanities research collective “Viral Conjunctures” (Université de Montréal, (https://viral-conjunctures.com), the conference will take place in person at the Université de Montréal from February 5th to February 7th, 2027. We invite proposals from scholars, researchers, students, artists, teachers, and medical practitioners working in and across various academic disciplines, health sectors, communal and activist contexts. English or French proposals for individual presentations, panels, and posters may address one or more of the questions outlined in the long CFP (https://viral-conjunctures.com/cfps-2/ ), be between 300 and 400 words, and include the presenter’s institutional affiliation and biography (80 words). Keynote speakers will be announced in August. Following the conference, we plan to publish revised conference presentations in different publication formats. The deadline for proposal submissions is SEPTEMBER 8, 2026. Proposals will be peer-reviewed, and responses will be sent out by September 22, 2026. Please send your proposals to camille.houle-eichel@umontreal.ca or submit them directly at: Submit Proposals – Viral Conjunctures
Scientific Conference Committee: Heike Härting (Université de Montréal), Heather Meek (Université de Montréal), Shane Neilson (McMaster University), and Cecily Raynor (McGill University)