34th Annual Conference of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM) in Cooperation with the Austrian Ethnomedical Society and Weltmuseum Wien

Visualization of medical topics to communicate aspects of health, suffering, diseases and therapeutic intervention may be used in different ways. Depending on setting, purpose and audience, images may be created not only as a didactic tool in order to explain medical content. Embedded in their respective social and wider contexts, artists around the world use their works to draw attention to social and disease-related suffering. Depiction can be done in the context of therapy, in the educational training of prospective medical professionals rooted in their medical cultures as well as on a broader societal stage. Simple sketches, vivid comics, elaborate paintings or computer-aided simulations, to name just a few possibilities, are used to directly illustrate topics that are often difficult to access through language alone. They not only facilitate understanding, but also enable awareness of and discussion about topics relevant to health. Pictures or drawings of the inner state and other visual tools can make it easier for patients to demonstrate and articulate their psychological or physical complaints and body perception. We will explore the many ways of visual expression in the context of healing and look at options of their use for individual healing, education or social awareness. This also raises the question of which type of visualisation is appealing to whom. The conference shall be aligned interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary with a focus on visual medical anthropology and transcultural medical humanities. Researchers, artists, curators, health professionals as well as patients and their relatives are invited to contribute with their experience and expertise. The AGEM conference 2022 will be a continuation of the previous conference "Aesthetics of Healing: Working with the Senses in Therapeutic Contexts" which took place in 2019. It is the aim of the organizers that the conference will be a tribute to Prof. Armin Prinz (1945-2018), physician and anthropologist, who was the first Professor of Medical Anthropology (Ethnomedizin) in Austria and a specialist for visual medical anthropology. He founded the Austrian Ethnomedical Society (Österreichische Ethnomedizinische Gesellschaft) and established a collection of numerous ethnomedical objects and paintings, which were donated to the Weltmuseum Wien in 2017.

Papers

“‘It’s all about the fantasy!’: Selfie filters, social networks and snapchat
dysmorphia in Modern China”, by Isabel Pires.