Every society is historically and currently familiar with different and shifting explanations for health and illness, and knows of different approaches to maintain the former and treat the latter. Healers, doctors, and patients are thus confronted with a multitude of partially contradictory therapies. Similar to non-biomedical therapies, biomedicine itself is fragmented into differing approaches. Faced with the division of the body and corresponding medical experts for specific body parts, patients as well as healers and doctors have to navigate partially contradictory assessments of the causes of illnesses and their treatment. Healing therefore requires cooperation with and without consensus between the most diverse actors. This conference seeks to examine such historical and current practices of healing cooperations around the world. Questions for contributions might include:

• How are compromises and/or syntheses in differing constellations achieved in practice?
• What kind of entities (e.g. humans, viruses, spirits, bacteria, machines, plants, genes, etc.) are involved and which negotiations lead to which results?
• How are specific healing situations connected to organized care facilities and structures and which tensions may arise?
• What kind of effects are created by alternating and/or simultaneously undergoing divergent and/or contradictory therapies?
• What kind of media, technologies, and infrastructures are involved in healing cooperations and how do they create various healing publics?

The aim of the conference is the joint discussion of different practices of healing cooperations, which we conceive as the laborious processing of ill-structured problems and open-ended ways of healing.

Conference Language: German and English

Please register for the conference at sekretariat@sfb1187.uni-siegen.de No conference fees are charged. Conference drinks and food are complimentary, except for the dinner on Friday.

Physicians and psychotherapists can earn 16 CME points for attending the conference.