CFP Colonial Medical Ennui Workshop

Call For Papers

Colonial Medical Ennui

Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews

27-28 August 2026

The workshop Colonial Medical Ennui will bring together scholars in the medical humanities to examine the ordinariness and banality of colonial medicine from the lens of everyday or quotidian states of boredom or ennui. The workshop responds to the challenge raised by historians of colonialism (Thénault on "ordinary violence"; Dulucq et al on "imperial banality") to pay closer attention to the banal or ordinary aspects of colonialism, and understand the ways in which colonial medical practitioners (doctors, nurses, sanitarians, public health officers) interacted with colonised communities through processes, experiences and categories of inertia, inaction, procrastination, ennui, monotony, apathy, incompleteness, underachievement, and postponement. Exploring these both as representations, experiences, and strategies, as well as for their creative affordances and potentialities, the workshop will ask how our historical and anthropological understandings of colonial medicine should be approached through the lens of "imperial boredom" (Auerbach 2018).

Conveners: Dr Mattia Fumanti and Professor Christos Lynteris

The workshop conveners welcome applications from scholars from across the medical humanities relating to the following questions:

• How can a focus on "colonial medical ennui" help us reshape our understanding of colonial-colonised interactions beyond resistance/collaboration, hero/villain and bio/necro-political dichotomies?
• To what extent did "colonial medical ennui" function as a "structure of experience" (Rancière) or symbolic capital for colonial medics?
• What were the creative potentialities and affordances of "colonial medical ennui"?
• How was "colonial medical ennui" narrated, recorded, and communicated?
• What were the power/knowledge relations underlining "colonial medical ennui", and what hierarchies did this foster?
• Under what circumstances could "colonial medical ennui" be rendered into a "weapon of the week" by Indigenous subalterns, patients, and more broadly colonised communities?
• How may a focus on archival traces that embody these states of body/mind, and often deemed repetitive and uninteresting, foster a more ethnographic approach to colonial medicine?
• How can a focus on "colonial medical ennui" deepen our critique of colonialism beyond condemnations of overt violence, oppression and exploitation?

Accommodation will be provided by the Department of Social Anthropology. Speakers need to cover their travel expenses.

Please submit a title and abstract (max 200 words) as well as a short bionote (max 100 words) by April 30 to Prof. Christos Lynteris at the following address: cl12@st-andrews.ac.uk.