About this Workshop

The Medicine and Its Objects Workshop (MIO) is a forum for critically thinking about the plurality of medicine, as a problem space, in relation to the diverse social and material worlds in which it takes animate shape and form. It considers the “objects” of medicine and health sciences—whether the objects of inquiry guiding knowledge production, objects of intervention directing therapeutic processes, institutional objects that constitute medical domains, or material objects that mediate interactions at the interplay of theory and practice. 

MIO offers an intellectual space for participants to think together about what constitutes the “objects” of medicine, how these objects are mobilized in and through communities, bodies, policies, practices, and institutions, and the philosophical, theoretical, and grounded experiences of medicine and its objects as situated in embodied, socio-historical, and economic contexts.

As an interdisciplinary workshop, MIO draws together perspectives from various social scientific, biomedical, and humanistic disciplines with interests that coalesce around the social studies of medicine and allied health sciences. We welcome a variety of formats to foster an interdisciplinary community and exchange and offer experience in a range of academic genres.