This workshop explores new approaches to examine the history of medical missions from the perspectives of loyalties and transloyalties. Throughout the history of medical missions and World Christianity, tension persisted, for example between medicine and evangelism, between scientific development and ethical reflections, and between medical intervention and divine healing. Interplay of interests, values, and loyalties was found striking between various agents, such as between mission boards, missionaries, and colonial powers, and between mission hospitals, churches, and local communities. Research focusing on multi-layered identities and loyalties, as well as negotiations and shifts in-between (tentatively understood as “transloyalities”), would illuminate the complexity of human relations and the multifaceted processes in various contact zones in the history of medical missions and World Christianity.

The Centre of Mission and Global Studies at VID Specialized University, in collaboration with the Faculty of Health Studies and the Mission and Diakonia Archives at VID, invites presentation proposals from all disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and beyond. Topics to be addressed may include (but are not limited to):

·      “Healing bodies and saving souls”: medical missionaries’ professional loyalties

·      Medical missions, colonial/national powers, and international organizations

·      Conflicting and merging theories and practices of healing 

·      Medical missions, secularization, and modernization discourse

·      History of diakonia; the deacon and deaconess movements

·      Fundraising in medical and health work

·      Cooperation and conflict in medical philanthropy 

·      Metaphors of disease and spiritual illness of the Church

·      The meaning of the term “health” both physically and spiritually and definitions of terms such as “body”, “ability”, and “disability”

·      Gender issues in medical and health work

Based on submitted abstracts, we will select 20 participants to present their papers. The cost of board and lodging of the presenters during the workshop will be covered. Limited travel subsidies are available for selected participants with accepted paper proposals. 

Deadline to submit application: May 31, 2022. Please submit your application, consisting of a paper title, an abstract (max. 300 words), a short bio, and a note about travel subsidy if you wish to apply (approx. cost of airfare), to marina.wang@vid.no. We will notify the selected participants of acceptance by 10 June 2022. The workshop language will be English.

Deadline to submit a draft of a full paper: September 30, 2022. An edited volume of revised papers or a special issue in an established journal in the field is the planned output of the workshop.

For any queries and further information, please contact the workshop convener, Dr. Marina Xiaojing Wang (marina.wang@vid.no).