Call for Papers: Panzootics, Beyond Pandemics and Zoonoses, EASA2024

Christos Lynteris and Frédéric Keck invite paper proposals for the Panel 004 of the 18th EASA Biennial Conference (Barcelona, July 2024) on the topic of "Panzootics, Beyond Pandemics and Zoonoses."

In the past three years a global epidemic phenomenon has been unfolding, drawing much less attention or intervention that the Covid-19 pandemic. Known as a panzootic, this is a phenomenon that affects non-human animals. At present, two distinct panzootics are underway.

First, SARS-CoV-2, Covid’s pathogen, has spilled-back to nonhuman animals, both domesticated and wild, establishing what scientists believe to be vast reservoirs of the virus. Second, a highly pathogenic influenza strain, H5N1, has been affecting and decimating populations of domestic and wild birds, as well as maritime mammals across the globe.

The panel invites talks on the phenomenon of the panzootic, including both diseases that affect populations of one species across the globe, and diseases that spread across species on global scales. We invite papers on a) ethnographies of panzootics or epizootics with a panzootic potential; b) pandemic-panzootic dynamics; c) how medical and veterinary anthropology can help us conceptualize and understand panzootics; d) the challenge posed by panzootics to One Health and Planetary Health approaches; e) the ways in which panzootics are visualized or mediatized; f) how our understanding of panzootics may be informed by animal studies and multispecies ethnography, and what challenges panzootics poses to these approaches; g) how panzootics trouble understandings of the Anthropocene.

Bringing together anthropologists to discuss panzootics as a global challenge for the first time, the panel will allow participants to define together an emerging field of investigation and conceptualisation at the crossroads of medical anthropology and multispecies ethnography.

To propose a paper click the “Propose” link in P004 in EASA2024’s panel webpage.

The call for papers is currently open and will close on 22 January 2024.