I don’t think I realised how much the In Sickness & In Health conference had consumed my time and attention over the last few months until Monday morning when, with it all over, I turned back to my ‘old’ job.
It felt as if my normal work belonged to a BC before-conference world, with me like one of Susan Sontag’s citizens of that ‘other place’.
A big part of that sense of alienation from my prior work life came from the deep emotional investment that had gone into the conference.
We’d set out quite deliberately to make an event that wasn’t like the typical business conference. You know the sort: you fly in from some distant land, deliver a 10-minute talk, field one or two adversarial questions, then spend the rest of the conference looking for someone to talk to.
And, from my perspective, this was the biggest ‘win’ of the conference. I got a genuine sense that people felt connected, involved and invested.
This was in no small part to our focus on a more indigenous Māori approach to meetings; one that emphasises the importance of taking time to connect. The pōhiri we held at the start brought people carefully into the space, the extended break times, the lovely weather, the lovely food, and the 40-minutes for each talk seemed to give people space to extend their arms around their audience.
And our four keynotes didn’t disappoint, either. Annemarie Jutel’s vivacious interrogation of diagnosis, Erin Stapleton’s on-point analysis of toxic masculinity when we are all first female, Pouroto Ngaropo’s warm embrace of our shared histories, and Ian Buchanan’s palpation of lines and assemblage in the work of Deleuze and others, acted like the point of the conference spear.
I spent as much time as I could in workshops, and some of the quality of work that I saw blew me away. ISIH has always been a place where you’d find some of the brightest minds in critical healthcare, but this year was exceptional. There were works here that I’ll be pondering for months to come. Hopefully some of that will come out on ParaDoxa over 2024.
Speaking of which, next week I’ll be returning to business-as-usual for this site and starting what I hope will be a provocative series looking at whether critical posthumanism has a neoliberal problem.
But that’s for next week. Today, I’m just trying to remember how Canvas works again!