We would like to invite you for the Conference Caring Geographies, organised by Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management on 4 November 2022 at the Erasmus Pavilion.
- Date
- Friday 4 Nov 2022, 09:30 - 17:00
- Type
- Conference
- Spoken Language
- English
- Building
- Erasmus Pavilion
- Location
- Campus Woudestein
- Ticket information
There is no fee required to participate.
Regional areas are increasingly being (re)discovered and addressed by policymakers and practitioners as places for organising public services. For instance, “regionally-based” healthcare policies are considered suitable for handling contemporary challenges in healthcare, like increasing demands for older persons in the face of a declining workforce. The regional scale promises an unambiguous and therefore tempting solution as a space to break through restrictive institutional frameworks or abrasive and long-existing systems.
The emphasis of policymakers and practitioners on regionalisation more or less implies that regions are singular and bounded geographical spaces that are well defined, tangible, and ‘useable’ to develop a policy strategy. This overlooks how they, as socio-technical assemblages of knowing and doing, are made to care—and are being cared for—in return. Regional geographical boundaries in the organisation of healthcare are often taken for granted and seldom a topic of social scientific inquiry. However, their assumed, a priori, and clearly demarcated geographical boundaries can be questioned. The socio-political literature on regions shows that regions are not just ‘out there’, but emerge from multiple (and often contested) geographical and cultural constituencies, raising questions of how regions can be empirically studied and theorised.
Program information
The aim of this conference is to reflect on the region as a research object in the domain of medical and social care, and more particularly the current re-evaluation of the region in healthcare governance and policy. The conference program includes plenaries and parallel sessions with paper presentations. Please find below the program and a brief outline of the speaker contributions.
09.30 – 10.00 | Coffee and tea |
10.00 – 10.10 | Kick-off by Dr. Jitse Schuurmans (ESHPM) |
10.10 – 10.50 | Dr. Colin Lorne (Open University) Carry on rethinking the region! |
10.50 – 11.30 | Prof. Louise Meijering (University of Groningen) Micro-geographies of care |
11.30 – 11.45 | Short break |
11.50 – 12.55 | Panel sessions: round 1 |
13.00 – 14.00 | Lunch |
14.05 – 15.40 | Panel sessions: round 2 |
15.45 – 16.00 | Short break |
16.00 – 16.40 | Dr. Iris Wallenburg (ESHPM) Caring Regions as a Trading Zone of Practice, Policy and Science |
16.40 – 16.55 | Wrap-up by Prof. Roland Bal |
17.00 – 17.45 | Drinks and snacks |
Keynote speakers:
Dr. Colin Lorne, Open University
In the first keynote, Colin Lorne hopes to keep the conversation going by insisting on the need to carry on rethinking the region. If we are to move beyond taken-for-granted understandings of regions as pre-existing bounded territories, then what might that mean for those involved in making and researching health and care policy? With a view from Britain, he discusses how ‘thinking space relationally’ can offer a powerful way of studying the remaking of regions in healthcare and beyond. Colin Lorne will conclude by posing some questions for those struggling to get to grips with policy and politics in these unsettling times.
Professor Louise Meijering, University of Groningen
In the second keynote, Louise Meijering will zoom in to caring geographies at the individual level. She discusses how older adults, people with memory issues and stroke survivors experience practices of care, while using ‘activity space’ as a central concept. In so doing, she draws on a mixed-methods approach where she combines qualitative methods such as in-situ and in-depth interviews with spatial methods such as GPS-tracking.
Dr. Iris Wallenburg, ESHPM
In the final keynote, Iris Wallenburg will elaborate on four years of action-research in the Netherlands, in which she and other colleagues worked together with healthcare organizations, experts and policy makers to create the region as a physical, administrative and symbolic place of older person care. She will focus on the interactions between those actors to regionalize care. The concept of Trading Zone (Galison, 1997) is used to envision how distinct epistemic communities create in-between vocabularies and objects to facilitate communication and align caring and administrative activities. The narrative shows how regional collaboration was sought, experimented with, and negotiated among the actors involved in the context of a developing (and growing) science-policy-practice relationship. How can we conceptualize what happens in projects like these; how are the different roles, purposes and interests played out and what does this mean for the epistemic and ontological politics of providing and organizing care, policy making, and scientific work in regional care?
Venue
The conference will be held at the Erasmus Pavilion building, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 350, Rotterdam.
Downloads
- More information
Please do not hesitate to contact the organisers if there are any questions regarding the invitation and open call at office.hcg@eshpm.eur.nl.
