About | socialpath.org

Since 2010, the conference entitled The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization has taken place. The first one was in Aalborg, Denmark – and since then the conference has been held in several other places in Europe.

Presently the organizing team consists of Kieran Keohane (University College Cork, Ireland), Bert van den Bergh (The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands), Domonkos Sik (University Eötvös Loránd Budapest, Hungary) and Sabine Flick (Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg, Germany).

< In memory of our late team member and dear friend Anders Petersen: see 'Books' >

The main objectives of the conference have always been to address various interconnections between psychiatry and society. The conferences have done so by focusing on how contemporary epidemics, diseases, illnesses and medical syndromes are related to cultural pathologies of the collective social body, and how the body politic is related to the transformation and social embedding of psychiatric thinking. The central research hypothesis guiding the conferences is that contemporary epidemics are to be analysed in the light of radical changes in our civilization and of the social hegemonization of the biomedical and psychiatric perspective. A particular focus of the conferences have been the role of humanities and social sciences, particularly sociology, philosophy, psychology and anthropology, in helping to understand the connection between social transformations and psychiatric perceptions of health & well-being.

In the previous conferences we have been fortunate enough to attract acclaimed keynote speakers such as:

Alain Ehrenberg, Professor of Sociology, Université Paris Decartes, France.
Harvie Fergusson, Professor of Sociology, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham, England.
Keith Tester, Professor of Sociology, Hull University, England.
Ruth Levitas, Professor of Sociology, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies. University of Bristol, England.
Dany-Robert Dufour, Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris, France.
Renata Salecl, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Jan Slaby, Professor of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Ilina Singh, Professor of Neuroscience & Society, Oxford University, England.
Allan V. Horwitz, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University, US.
Matthew Ratcliffe, Professor of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria.
Hartmut Rosa, Professor of Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany.
Thomas Fuchs, Professor for Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Heidelberg, Germany.
Alan Blum, Senior Scholar at York University, England.
Chris Rojek, Professor of Sociology, University of London, England.
Máté Zombory, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Nidesh Lawtoo, Leuven University