Preliminary Programme

“Frame analysis" considers doctor-patient relationships a complex network of social roles, discourses and emotional processes from which social agents can negotiate their own reference framework, subjective experiences or identity construction. (Goffman,1976).
Bridging socio-cultural, historical and media analysis, in this paper we look at how doctor-patients relationships were created and projected in the Spanish written press at the end of the 20th century (1980-2000), a period of profound social changes in Spain. We will analyze a selection of articles published in the Spanish newspapers (ABC, El País and local newspapers) between 1980 and 2000. We will use a sociohistorical discourse analysis and a sensitive gender perspective in our study.
Media representation of medical encounters contributes to better understand the flow and transformation of meanings that gender acquired and simultaneously shaped the patient-physician interaction. The discursive role of the media in this interaction is discussed through the lenses of its “regime of representation” (Gal and Woolard, 2001). During the process of “representing” doctor-patients interaction, media strategically provided ideological codification (Fairclough, 1995) to gender, transforming knowledge, notions and emotions from arbitrary to natural, logical and morally accepted dimensions.
Goffman, Erving. 1976. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of the Experience, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Fairclough, Norman. (1995). Media discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Gal, Susan, & Woolard, Kathryn. (2001). Constructing languages and publics: authority and representation. In S. Gal & K. Woolard (Eds.), Languages and Publics: the making of authority (pp. 1–12). Manchester: St. Jerome. (Show less)

In this presentation, I want to situate pain and hope as energies that anchor people in particular sites that bond particular representations and realities. Both, pain and hope, emerge and move of the affect field by enabling the multiplication of forms of flows emerging from particular encounters. The emergence of pain and hope from the relations between bodies, and from the encounters that those relations are entangled within, make the materialities of space - time always-already affective. Following Karantogianni, I argue that the virtual presents itself as a space-time where pain and hope affectivities flow enabling bodies to mediate the imaginary and the actual, producing different space - times of experience. To this end, I examine affect on Facebook. Particularly I focus on Endometriosis support groups as social spaces sustained through digitally enabled affective structures that support pain and hope meaning-making, enabling feelings of engagement and potentiality for bodies to be affect and affected by change. (Show less)

The images of hysterical attacks of female patients at the Salpêtrière are well known by historians of medicine and photography. Most of scholars have analysed the images to examine the history of hysteria and the representation of its symptoms (Didi-Huberman [1984[, Hunter [2016]). This paper, however, will focus on the making of the photographs, rather than on the content of the images. How were these photographs taken? How was the space in which patients were photographed –was it a photographic studio in the hospital, or just the garden? Which kind of equipment was used, and who photographed them –was it a photographer or a doctor? These questions shift the focus away from representations to the practice of photography.
This paper argues that a focus on photographic practices will allow re-examining the relationship between doctors and patients at the Salpêtrière and other hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century. Photography will be presented as a medical procedure that was regulated and shaped medical practices and patients’ experiences. In particular, this paper will focus on the emotional experiences involved in photographing and being photographed in the hospital, with a particular emphasis on its gender aspects. (Show less)