Location: University of Leeds
Dates: 30 June to 3 July 2026
Submission Deadline: 5.00pm (GMT) 11th January 2026
Conference Co-Convenors: Dr Alexia Moncrieff & Dr Katherine Rawling
Conference Committee: Dr Alex Bamji, Professor Shane Doyle, Megan Graham, Professor Robert Hornsby, Dr Will Jackson, Dr Joanna Phillips, Alexandra Ward
As healthcare systems around the world come under increasing pressure in terms of their capacity, cost, and capabilities, ‘In/Out’ asks how the history of health and healthcare has been shaped by structural, material, emotional, and psychological boundaries. What does it mean to be ‘in good health’? How did people enter and exit healthcare systems? How can considerations of the terms ‘in’ or ‘out’ help us understand the histories of health? By bringing together histories of health and medicine from antiquity to the present day, we will explore what ‘in’ and ‘out’ can reveal about the impact of different gateways, routes, breaks, and barriers on people’s experiences of health, disability, illness, and healthcare in the past. Care inequalities are ever-present, and we also seek to reveal the experiences of those who could not or chose not to access medical care, or whose access was partial, delayed, interrupted, or contingent. We also seek to understand the associated legacies of harm that can accompany such inequalities. Finally, whether inside or outside formal care settings, medical practitioners also entered and exited practice as both givers and receivers of healthcare, so we also seek to consider the experiences of those individuals.
Taking a broad definition of both ‘in’ and ‘out’ we invite papers that consider experiences of being in and/or out of health or health care in any period or geographical location. These might include, but are not limited to the following:
- Healthcare ‘pathways’, ‘journeys’ or ‘processes’ (e.g. entering, proceeding through or leaving care in various contexts or conditions)
- In and out of care (e.g. diagnostics, recuperation, recovery, recurrence)
- Healthcare spaces (e.g. in/outdoors, in/outpatient, healthy spaces)
- Enablers and/or barriers to accessing or leaving care
- Entering and/or leaving practice
- Being inside or outside of orthodoxy or convention (e.g. trends or fashions, diagnostic classification systems)
- Inclusion and exclusion in healthcare
- Bodies in/out of health (e.g. leaky bodies, bodily boundaries, entering/leaving/removal from bodies)
- In/out of the body (e.g. IVF, organ transplants, assistive technologies, substances)
We invite proposals for:
- 20-minute individual papers (including paper title, 250-word abstract, 150-word speaker bio).
- Full panels (including panel title and 200-word rationale for panel, chair’s bio and material as above for the 3-4 papers).
- 1.5 hr roundtable/interactive session (including session title, 300-word rationale, 200-word outline of format and any room set up requirements, bios for the chair and speakers).
- If the session you would like to run does not meet any of these definitions, please do contact the conference organisers to discuss potential formats.
- We particularly welcome papers or panels that are explicitly inclusive and embed diversity into our discussions.
Submissions should be emailed as a single document attachment to sshm2026leeds@gmail.com by 5.00pm (GMT) 11th January 2026. Invitations to present will be circulated at the beginning of February 2026.