Biomedicine, borders and borderlands: (re)Negotiating belonging, home, care, and nation

Co-edited by (alphabetically):
Dr. Courtney Addison, Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton,
Dr. Pauline Herbst and Dr. Mythily Meher

As medical anthropologists, science studies and cultural studies scholars, we recognise the porosity of bodies—both biological and institutional. The material, transcendental potential of biomedical porosity deepens when placed alongside conversations on spaces in-between, compelling us to rearticulate borders, boundaries, subjectivities and social porosity. Drawing on Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s generative rendering of borderlands as spaces of hybridity and possibilities, we seek papers that articulate bodies, institutions and practices in borderlands, but also as borderlands. To imagine biomedicine in and as a borderland allows us to stage conversations on medical agentive possibilities and structural limitations in radically plural terms: to be continually becoming, to be one thing then another and then both, to be subjectively liminal, to be ontologically uncertain. To live and negotiate in and from medical borderlands makes visible the hybridity of experiences and articulations of bodies in biomedicine. Thinking with biomedical borderlands might enable enlivened understandings, even re-imaginings, of justice, morphology, resistance, morality and coercion in these sites.

And yet, the porosity of bodies (biological and non-biological) is often contested in biomedical, national and institutional norms and discourse. Now, especially, COVID-19 calls for reconfigurations —at various levels—not only of daily understandings of borders and borderlands, but also how belonging, home, and nation are articulated and experienced. We ask what happens to porosity when stringent borders are enforced in the name of public health or the guise of protectionism? Are there spaces to imagine anew a world more connected than the one prior, or are borderlands no longer sites of potential? What does the new politics of borderlands portend for our collective and connected futures?

For this special issue, we welcome submissions that are: conceptually and/or empirically driven; creative and experimental in their engagement with biomedical bodies and borderlands; and enlivened by debates in queer, feminist, Indigenous, anti-colonial, and disabilities studies. Work reflecting the current pandemic is urgent and welcome, as is work exploring biomedical borders, borderlands and our driving questions/issues that does not engage with what is raised by COVID-19. We imagine a collaborative and supportive writing endeavour for this special issue over the four months between acceptance of abstracts to submission of articles for review. Long abstracts can be anywhere between 250 to 500 words. We would welcome the chance to discuss potential contributions in advance.

Email enquiries and abstracts to: courtney.addison@vuw.ac.nz, nayantara.s.appleton@vuw.ac.nz, mythily.meher@gmail.com, p.herbst@auckland.ac.nz
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Special Issue Timeline (with 2021 publication expectation):
Oct 1st, 2020: Long abstracts due
Nov 15th, 2020: Confirmation of paper invitation (for review, acceptance based on peer review)
March 15th, 2021: Full papers due with approximate 6000 words (sent to review)
Oct 1st, 2021: Tentative publication date (after review acceptances)