Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Health Sociology Review

For a Special Issue on
Matters of Time in Health and Illness

This special issue will bring together papers exploring how time relates with and in health and illness. We encourage submissions that think with ‘time’ in many ways: as a heuristic device for exploring the sociological dimensions of how health and care unfold (in prolonged and fleeting ways); as a sociohistorical situating of health and care practices; as a way of measuring and constituting health experiences and events; and as a speculative orientation towards anticipated and imagined futures of health.

We invite proposals for empirical research (including qualitative, quantitative, and creative methods), critical or reflective analyses, conceptual or theoretical papers, and methodological papers. Submissions must make a clear contribution to sociological inquiry relevant to health but may be informed by conceptual and empirical debates from a broader range of health and social sciences.

Possible topics and approaches to thinking with matters of time in health and illness include (but are not limited to):

• Waiting (e.g. waiting for care; waiting for a cure; waiting for recognition by medical institutions; end-of-life care)
• Bodies and affects in time (e.g. chronic and degenerative disease; ageing; time and disability; temporalities of treatment; transformation through pharmaceuticals; health hauntologies)
• Time, crisis, and health emergencies (e.g. time in planetary health; outbreaks; zoonotic disease; health and climate change)
• Generational health (e.g. health legacies; reproductive health; epigenetics; health generations)
• Health histories (e.g. situating health in history; rewriting medical histories; historical exclusion of medical subjects in research; historical experimentation on marginalised groups)
• Tracking (e.g. personal health technologies; testing and surveillance; lives of health data)
• Pace and routine (e.g. daily care; routines; rhythms of recovery; speeding up and slowing down care)
• Time and events (e.g. the politics of epidemic/pandemic; the moment of discovery; making eras in health)
• Futuring (e.g. techno-utopias; viral elimination; prognosis; speculation; anticipatory regimes; anticipating risk; health policy goals and targets; modelling)
• Intervention and process (e.g. intervention in times of uncertainty; organising health systems with time; multiplying health effects over time; prevention and early intervention)
• Memory (e.g. trauma; Alzheimer’s disease and dementia; intergenerational sharing of care knowledges and practices; memory work)
• Methodology (e.g. measuring time; enacting and constituting temporality through research methods and clinical instruments; critical approaches to longitudinal health research)

Interested authors should complete the Call for Papers form by 11:59pm AEDT Sunday 12 February 2023. Minimum details required include a title, abstract or proposal of research (250 words), author details, and a short bio for the lead author (50 words). Authors will be notified of the outcome of their proposal by the end of February 2023 and invited to submit a full manuscript for peer review by 12 June 2023.

We encourage abstracts or proposals to include details on how your paper will conceptualise ‘time’ and any key theories or literatures your paper will draw upon.

If you have any questions, please email Mia Harrison at [email protected]

Manuscripts for this special issue are limited to a maximum word limit of 7,500 words, including all text, footnotes and references.

Publication Timeline

• 12 February 2023: Submission deadline for abstracts or proposals
• End of February 2023: Invitation to authors to submit a full manuscript
• 12 June 2023: Submission deadline for full manuscripts
• First issue 2024: Publication of special issue

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article