海角社区

Monica Greco 

Monica Greco (BA, MA, PhD) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath, UK. Working at the intersection of the history and philosophy of medicine, science and technology studies (STS), and medical sociology, Monica has made significant contributions to the critical analysis of knowledge practices in psychosomatic medicine. Her work articulates the broader social and political implications of different ways of conceiving health and illness, as well as different ways of naming, classifying, and explaining. Monica has published widely on these topics throughout her career, including the monograph Illness As a Work of Thought (Routledge, 1998) and a guest-edited special issue of BMJ Medical Humanities on ‘Biopolitics and Psychosomatics’ (2019).

Monica Greco will be keynote speaker in relation to Theme 1: What is a symptom?

Keynote presentation: Symptoms and the question of meaning: a Pandora's box?
The question of whether symptoms have meaning, and how their meaning should be interpreted for medical purposes, has been a recurrent theme in the history of psychosomatic medicine. This question effectively distinguishes psychosomatic medicine from modern biomedicine, where symptoms appear meaningful only as potential indicators of disease. Medical epistemologies do not only serve medical purposes but also mediate social expectations, legitimacy, and attributions of responsibility. As new forms of knowledge begin to reconceptualise symptoms as complex, dynamic phenomena in their own right, we are witnessing a shift in their epistemological status. This raises an important question: if we change how we understand what symptoms signify, how might this reshape the social relations they structure?

Rikke Sand Andersen

Rikke Sand Andersen is an anthropologist and professor of medical anthropology at the Institute of Public Health, Research Unit of General Practice, 海角社区, and the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. She is co author of Cancer Entangled – Anticipation, Acceleration and the Danish State (2023) and has conducted extensive research on care seeking and the social and sensorial dynamics that shape how people come to notice and act upon bodily changes. Her work explores how diagnostic infrastructures as well as everyday forms of knowledge cultivate different modes of sensing and responsibility, and how these divergences contribute to clinical encounters and social inequalities in access to care.

Mette Bech Risør

Mette Bech Risør is an anthropologist and professor of medical anthropology at the Center for General Practice, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, and the Department of Community Medicine, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Through anthropological studies on different patient groups and their healthcare-seeking practices, she has developed a research focus on the configuration of patients’ bodily sensations, symptoms, and diagnoses in encounters with health professionals. She is e.g. a co-editor of Diagnostic Fluidity – Working with Uncertainty and Mutability (2018). Currently, she is engaged in studies on tiredness as an existential phenomenon with a focus on everyday life practices and morally situated care-seeking.

Rikke Sand Andersen and Mette Bech Risør will be keynote speakers in relation to Theme 2: Symptoms in society

Keynote presentation: Divergent sensorial regimes: On care seeking and experiential frictions between domestic and clinical settings
Based on our research on care seeking and departing from a sensorial anthropology that understands symptoms as embodied and relational phenomena, we discuss how symptoms are morally and sensorially differentiated across intimate, domestic and clinical settings. We explore how people embody, notice, interpret, and act upon sensations in ways that are shaped by cultural expectations, situated biologies, diagnostic infrastructures, and everyday moralities of responsibility. We also show how, what counts as a symptom at home may be dismissed as noise in the clinic, and what is clinically legible may feel experientially irrelevant, ambiguous or out-of-place in domestic life. These frictions raise questions about 1) how sensory authority is distributed across social classes and different bodies, 2) how people navigate differences between lived sensation and clinical verification, 3) how moral judgments about “acting in time” or “waiting too long” influence divergent sensory regimes, and 4) how spaces of living and social affordances influence regimes of sensations and ethics of care.

In summing up, we suggest that symptoms are understood as bio-sensorial events, which are noticed, interpreted, and acted upon within specific social settings. Also, by attending to divergent sensorial regimes we are allowed to see how care seeking is not simply a matter of individual choice, but a socially uneven process in which some bodies are more actionable and trusted than others.

Rani Lill Anjum

is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She led the 4 year research project, CauseHealth, and works on philosophy of science and medicine.

Rani Lill Anjum will be keynote speaker in relation to Theme 3: Understanding 'risk factors' and 'causes' in the development of symptom persistence.

Keynote presentation: CauseHealth: Rethinking causality, complexity and evidence for the unique patient
All sciences, including health science, comes with a number of philosophical assumptions, what we call ‘philosophical bias’: basic implicit assumptions in science. For instance, with the introduction of the evidence-based framework in the 1990ies, evidence of causes and risks took a clear quantitative turn. The adopted notions of cause, probability and risk motivated a strong emphasis on big data sets, large population studies, statistical approaches and risk factors. In the CauseHealth project, we started instead from a different set of assumptions: that causality, probability and risk are qualitative in nature and therefore require more qualitative approaches. This philosophical framework focuses instead on individual dispositions, causal complexity, local variations and context-sensitivity. A new way to model causality as vectors is briefly introduced to illustrate some of these features.

Chris Burton

is Professor of Primary Medical Care at the University of Sheffield. His main research and clinical interest is in persistent physical symptoms but his work extends to broader issues around the intersection of physical and mental health. His work focuses on the interpersonal aspects of care including involving the processes of diagnosis, explanation and reassurance. Chris recently led Multiple Symptoms Study 3, a large trial of an extended role GP consultation intervention for persistent physical symptoms.
His research involves a range of approaches including evidence synthesis, analysis of routine healthcare data, qualitative analysis and the development and evaluation of interventions. He has a longstanding interest in the application of complexity science to illness and healthcare. He leads the Primary Care Research group within the School of Medicine and Population Health at the University of Sheffield.
Chris worked for many years as a GP in a rural former coal-mining community in the SouthWest of Scotland. He completed his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh and was a Senior Lecturer in Primary Care at the University of Aberdeen before moving to Sheffield in 2017.

Chris Burton will be keynote speaker in relation to Theme 4: Management and alleviation of symptoms.

Keynote presentation: Persistent symptoms in medical conditions: what can we do better?
Persistent physical symptoms (including pain and fatigue) are common after optimal treatment of many long-term medical conditions. They provide challenges for patients and for clinicians. This talk will explore these challenges and suggest ways that persistent symptoms can be understood, explained and sometimes managed.

Marie Højlund

is a composer, sound artist, and associate professor of Sound Studies at Aarhus University. Her research explores sonic citizenship through practice-based approaches, focusing on soundscapes where boundaries between private and public, individual and community become blurred—such as in hospitals. She investigates how attuning practices can foster inclusion and raise questions of voice, privilege, and belonging. As a composer, she has created works for theatre and television and released several albums. In 2023, she was honored with the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Award, one of Denmark’s most prestigious recognitions for composers.

Marie Højlund will be the closing keynote speaker. 

Keynote presentation: Listening as Care: Sonic Citizenship and the Sensory Politics of Symptoms
In this keynote, I explore symptoms not merely as internal signals, but as embodied phenomena shaped through sensorial mediation—especially sound. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives across sound studies, medical humanities, anthropology, and artistic practice, symptoms are understood as felt, interpreted, and communicated through multisensory environments—through rhythms, atmospheres, and relational attunements.
I propose that by cultivating awareness of sonic and sensory attunements, we can become active sensory citizens—participants in shared sensory environments—who resist the isolating effects of fear and estrangement, and instead foster relational presence, embodied agency, and mutual care.

Focusing on healthcare spaces such as hospitals, I examine how soundscapes, visual atmospheres, tactile surfaces, and spatial arrangements modulate the experience of symptoms. Central to this inquiry is the concept of sonic citizenship—the idea that individuals participate in shared sonic environments not only as passive receivers but as active co-creators of meaning, care, and presence. Sonic citizenship foregrounds listening as a relational and ethical practice, one that can transform clinical encounters and care environments into spaces of attunement and mutual recognition.

As the closing keynote of SymPCa 2026, this presentation aims to broaden the epistemological palette of symptom research, inviting participants to consider aesthetic, affective, and participatory dimensions of care. It opens a conversation for future inquiry: How can interdisciplinary collaborations between clinicians, researchers, artists, and patients reshape our understanding of symptoms—and the spaces in which they unfold?