Paper short abstract:

Ethnography in Malawi reveals complex local realities set aside in pursuit of trachoma elimination. A WHO strategy, ignoring context, draws on rationalities and moral justifications from development goal rhetoric, which prove counterproductive for tackling genuine everyday health concerns in Malawi

Paper long abstract:

The WHO's global elimination policy for trachoma, the leading infectious cause of global blindness, boasts some impressive impact since its outset in 1997. Under the umbrella of the neglected tropical diseases, grandiose global health rhetoric positions the public health strategy for trachoma, 'SAFE' - Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial cleanliness and Environmental improvement - as 'one of the more convincing ways to 'make poverty history', aligning itself the UN's sustainable development goals. However SAFE is implemented with little attention to the social, political, economic, and historical context in which it is delivered. In doing so, assumptions of universal disease experience, discrete, linear pathological processes, and rational human responses are made. In addition, the strategy's more holistic dimensions are often side-lined in pursuit of the alluring elimination targets, themselves negotiated and constructed with little evidence base. Ethnographic work in Malawi at national, regional and local levels with strategy implementers, policymakers, health care workers and a Yao village population, reveals complex local realities which are persistently set aside in pursuit of the elimination goals. Tools, technologies, and metaphors of the strategy do political work which is strategically ignored by the multi-million-pound global elimination assemblage, even when evidence suggests otherwise. Concerns regarding the sustainability of global funding, and national political will, drive a steadfast but false optimism, counterproductive for tackling genuine everyday health concerns in Malawi

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines power and politics in vaccination programmes in Myanmar. It highlights the role of local actors in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals, whilst also challenging dominant development paradigms in which the state is ultimately deemed responsible for community 'development'.

Paper long abstract:

Myanmar's National Health Plan (NHP) promises to achieve universal health coverage by 2030, in line with SDG Target 3.8. Both the NHP and the new government's endorsement of the SDGs are widely seen by international actors as progress, in a country where a many still lack access to healthcare. However, there is significant debate within Myanmar about how universal health coverage should be achieved, and what role state and non-state actors should play. In the country's south-eastern borderlands, decades of conflict have resulted in the development of parallel systems for health, with local health workers providing services under the umbrella of the ethnic nationalist groups. These health workers question the vision underlying Myanmar's NHP - one where power remains centralised in the Bamar-dominated state. In recent years, health workers in Kayah and Kayin States have worked in partnership with government health workers to implement an Expanded Programme for Immunization in the borderlands. These local health workers have capitalised on the impetus provided by the NHP and the state's commitment to the SDGs, in order to achieve greater health coverage in their areas. Yet through these programmes, the health workers are also challenging the assumption underlying both the NHP and the SDGs, that the state is ultimately responsible for 'development' in local communities. By examining questions of power and politics in vaccination programs in Kayah and Kayin States, this paper highlights the role of local actors in redefining dominant development paradigms.

Paper short abstract:

Vaccination although emerged as a greatest scientific invention against microorganisms to decrease human morbidity and mortality. Nonetheless, it gradually has become a multifaceted and controversial phenomenon due to an ongoing complex interplay between universal and particular factors.

Paper long abstract:

To avert havoc wreaked by microorganisms, vaccination appeared as a greatest scientific invention. At a micro level, vaccination follows a universal approach that is attested by the United Nations and other global stakeholders in the form of certain directions, recommendations to their signatories to comply with and benchmarks to achieve. Also, vaccination, measles vaccine included, follows the similar principles which have been used to eradicate polio or smallpox. At a micro level, vaccination has gradually become a multifaceted and controversial phenomenon, as presently it is engulfed with rumours, conspiracies, mistrust and resistance, especially due to the enormous changes that have occurred over time particularly due to the sociocultural and ecopolitical characteristics of a country as well as disease-related specificity. In this regard, the internet has played a significant part as now the (mis)information travels with a higher velocity than before. As a result, there are more aware or 'ill' aware (than unaware) individuals. Hence, vaccination demonstrates a complex interplay between the universal approach and particular factors. However, ignoring the interplay while employing the universal approach and paying insufficient attention to the particularities has made serving the great cause of protecting humans from suffering rather problematic. This paper draws on my PhD fieldwork that focused on measles and vaccination in Sindh Province of Pakistan in 2014.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the complex interplay between educational systems, global policies and the students strategies in imagining a future in urban Portugal. Considering the fourth goal on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we question how it has been understood and debated locally.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we take in consideration the global reconfiguration of education and its impact in national educational policies, seeking to understand how local practices respond to such transformations. The most recent reform of the Portuguese educational system advocates an explicit articulation with both local and global stakeholders and reflects what has been a crescent focus on education as a privileged driving force for development. A key element to the design of the educational reform was the promulgation of a document entitled The Student's profile by the end of compulsory education, a model for designing future policies regarding education, establishing global citizenship as one of its primary goals. Our research focus on representations about the future from students at the end of compulsory education that have experienced the schooling process amidst a crescent focus on global citizenship and an overall uncertainty regarding the future. We consider the educational communities of public schools in Almada, a large post-industrial town in Lisbon Metropolitan Area. As educational reforms are set in motion, we ask how the global stakeholders are influencing the design of a renewed role and representation of education in Portuguese society. Considering the fourth goal on the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, we question how it has been understood and debated locally, taking in account the Portuguese context. This paper inquires about the global dialogues impacting on new forms of subjectivity both as a consequence of the schooling process and of negotiations between agents and institutions.

Paper short abstract:

Following what the conference theme calls a 'new form of identity and relatedness', this paper explores the creative responses of Globe Skeptics to the cosmological and futuristic imperatives embedded in UN's global agendas and plans.

Paper long abstract:

Following Pierre Bourdieu's essay 'Rethinking the State' (1998), this paper focuses on current fringe challenges to the foundations of the idea of the 'global' and its naturalization through the power of unquestionable discourses such as government and media narratives, scientific theories and 'just so' stories. For Bourdieu the 'grip of the state is felt more powerfully' in the 'realm of symbolic production' (1998:38).

I analyze excerpts from conversations with Globe Skeptics - an emerging form of identity and relatedness - and how they challenge the bases of UN's universalist global ontology, and even question the accepted reality of the globe, a supposed 'unquestionable'. I look into how Globe Skeptics articulate alternative positions regarding vaccines, home schooling, government, media, and the cosmologies of academic astrophysics, down to the shape of the earth as a globe (or oblate spheroid) and its purported movements.

Globe Skeptics question mainstream science and many of its assumptions, conduct their own experiments and produce original art. They imagine alternative futures that disrupt the established foundations and conventions of the current dominant Global cosmology and its accompanying transhumanist futurism.

The ensuing discussion invites us to meditate on the concept of 'unquestionables' and the assumptions that accompany supposedly established facts about nature and the world itself. Are we at the onset of what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift and a scientific revolution? Globe Skeptics seem to believe so, but they often learn the hard way that questioning dominant unquestionables publicly can marginalize them.