Two-day Research Symposium,

Manchester, UK, 10-11 July 2002

How are norms established and defined? To what extent do historical and cultural contexts play a part in the construction of norms and deviance? This conference will address questions about the definition and the demarkation of norms and deviance in relation to social, historical and cultural factors.

Core issues will include:

* Normal medicine - statistical, biological, cultural and moral norms; orthodox and heterodox medicine

* The normal body - the perfect body and disability; the healthy and the diseased body; degeneration; the normal body and fascism; NORMALIZING THE DEVIANT BODY [sexual surgery, plastic surgery]

* The normal mind - rationality and madness; other minds and other rationalities; NORMAL PERSONALITY AND PERSONALITY 'DISORDERS' * The racialised body and mind - normal and pathological races; whiteness as norm and whiteness as race

* The gendered body and mind - the normal male/female

* Normal sexuality - heterosexuality AS NORM, homosexuality AS GENDER DEVIATION, bad sex, unnatural sex

* Middle-class norms.

* Liberal democracy and 'the evil' (Holocaust, ethnic cleansing)

* Normative religion - religion and belief; Christianity and Islam

* Cultural norms and deviations - globalisation ; Western norms and local traditions; the decline of the West; WESTERN DEVELOPMENT/MODERNIZATION AS NORM AND GOAL

* Scientific norms - normal science, bad science, heterodox science; paradigm shifts

If you would like to present a paper on any of the above issues and/or if you would like to receive further details, please contact:

Dr Chandak Sengoopta
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine/Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine University of Manchester
Mathematics Tower
Manchester M13 9PL UK
E-mail: c.sengoopta@man.ac.uk

or

Dr Waltraud Ernst
Department of History
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ UK
E-mail: WER@soton.ac.uk