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- Convenors:
-
Christopher Davis
(SOAS)
Sophie Day (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
- Location:
- JUB-116
- Start time:
- 11 September, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Considering the body as a site of learning, this panel asks how experiences of ill health produce and locate diverse concerns, creative misunderstandings, and contingent collaborations. Our emphasis is on the unstable yet enduring and dynamic assemblage that constitutes any global health forum.
Long Abstract:
If, as Latour (2004), Despret (2004) and others have argued, the body is a site of learning and learns to be affected, might it be helpful to think about how such bodies produce, consume or reproduce the concerns and practices that assemble a global health? The global only happens in local regimes (including of course Geneva and New York) but what is learned and what is disregarded, or perhaps considered mere noise (Serres, 1982), will depend upon a range of factors - not least, national policy and discourse, diverse medical logics, the experience of ill health and of caring for the sick. These factors create varied trajectories and shape further events; they create different modes of attention and suggest alternative ways of visioning global health.
Our panel explores the varied practices having place in the midst of this always-local, always-heterogeneous and always noisy field of 'global health'. Contributions might consider the field in relation to boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989), to a range of non-hierarchical plotting or narrative devices such as story boards (film), concept boards (design) and mood boards (marketing), or to other methods of uniting unlike things. Together we examine the diversity of logics and collaborations in any global health forum, along with the productive misunderstandings and translations uniting and dividing them. Our aim is to consider the contingent and dynamic qualities within the unstable but enduring assemblage that is 'global health'.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Sophie Day (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
What might global health look like from the shop floor? Considering one London hospital’s cancer services in terms of its global reach and constitution, I argue that any ‘global cancer health’ rests on competing, sometimes conflicting and intrinsically multiple positions.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary references to global health express concerns with privatisation of the international public sphere; persistent, growing inequities and increased mobility as well as aspirations to restore an inclusive public 'welfare'. It is unclear, however, what global health might look like from from below rather than from a bird's eye view.
Focusing on a hospital site in London, breast cancer services involve a 'global' population of staff and patients and global practices, based on experimental and translational research that spans the world supported by a range of industry, government and NGO consortia. Cancer care is closely entwined with this research through the protocols that dictate steps and evidence to follow in assessing risk, diagnosis and therapy.
This cancer-care assemblage depends, I argue, on fundamentally plural views within the workforce, among patients and on the part of any one individual. In brief, pursuit of biologically-, socially- or individually-determined pathways rarely coincide any more than do the idioms that accord participants contrasting roles in decision-making. On the shop floor, it is impossible to find a unifying perspective. It will be helpful, therefore, to consider global cancer health in terms of these constitutive and multiple interests, misunderstandings and intrinsically different positions.
Hayley MacGregor (Institute of Development Studies)
Paper short abstract:
I explore tensions that have emerged whilst negotiating relations with policy-makers as part of a research collaboration in a particular ‘global health forum’ in South Africa. I reflect upon trade-offs and the implications for ethnographic work within an interdisciplinary funding environment.
Paper long abstract:
In the 'field' of 'global health', funders often specify that research should have 'policy relevance' and achieve 'identifiable health outcomes'. I will discuss an example of collaboration in a research project in South Africa that focuses on an issue high on the UNAIDS agenda , namely 'retention in care' of people with HIV. This problem is framed as one of keeping people with a lifelong condition adherent to medication, and attending to regimes of self-care and appointments for disease monitoring. Furthermore, it is an issue seen as relevant to policy for other chronic progressive illnesses: the 'integration' of care for all chronic diseases and equity of care has become a key policy priority in the 'local' context of South Africa.
The research project in question has involved an interdisciplinary team and explicit engagement with policy makers in the state health sector. For the researchers, the conditions of funding dictate such engagement; for the policy makers, pressure to identify new 'innovations' for solving 'retention' and achieving 'integration', creates a situation where collaboration has mutual benefit. However, tensions are evident, particularly around agenda-setting and the framing of research questions. I will reflect upon negotiating trade-offs, and raise questions about the implications for ethnographic work within such collaborative projects. Might it be possible to open up space in such collaborations to offer critique of the big agendas of global health, and the solutions proposed, whilst balancing ongoing engagement with the diverse publics and disciplines that constitute these assemblages?
Christopher Davis (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
How can stories of wolf reintroduction offer insight into the principles and practices of global health? The transformation of wolves from vermin to co-inhabitants demonstrates the way a politics of protection & immunity reflects expanding moral horizons & the entanglements these entail.
Paper long abstract:
What can the politics of wolf recovery & reintroduction possibly have to offer as insight into the principles and practices of global health? Taken as a privileged example of interspecies relationship, one defined by humans as deeply agonistic, the transformation of wolves from predacious vermin to valued co-inhabitants can be said to demonstrate the ways in which a politics of protection and immunity both reflects and makes possible the expansion of moral and social horizons, including the willed entanglements such community entails.
An examination of the politics, policies and social processes surrounding the recovery and reintroduction of wolf populations in the US reveals the steps through which human communities go as they learn to live alongside wolves. This, in turn, allows us to observe the multiplicity of perspectives and interests converging in shared spaces, the conflicts and collaborations developing from them, and the emergence from these of a gradual, unstable, and fragile acceptance of the inescapable entanglement with an other whose interests will always be beyond domestication.
Using impertinent comparison as a method, the paper will thus endeavour to put forward a perspective for health that is dynamic, environmentally attuned, communal and modest in its expectations. Can we learn to approach global health without the concept, however latent, of eradication informing our values, defining our goals? If we did, what would happen then?
Kate Milosavljevic (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the peculiar place of the prosthesis when thinking about disability, citizenship, health and rehabilitation. The bodies produced that emerge and not only sleek, replicable and desirable but are also historically constituted; fleshy, porous and fallible.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the peculiar place of the prosthesis when thinking about disability, citizenship, health and rehabilitation. Prosthesis based research has the ability to speak to local, national, and international interests of the individuals and organisations involved in the design, fitting and wearing of a prosthetic device, as well as multinational companies that manufacture, market and supply them. Blurring the lines of enhancement and impairment, they speak to the processes of globalisation, and the increasing technologising of life as we know it. Prostheses produce bodies that not only emerge as sleek, replicable and desirable but that are also historically constituted; fleshy, porous and fallible. I argue that the prosthesis is a both an abstract and a concrete boundary object (Star and Griesemer, 1989). They create a paradox, in part due to their coupling of the technological to the biological, but also due to their potential for disrupting the categories 'natural' and 'augmented', and to the literary origins of the very term prosthesis (Wills 1995). By placing prostheses at the centre of my investigations, I find that not only are they interesting to think about, but that they are even more interesting to think with. The history of prostheses is intimately tied to military action, to state building and to the production of a mobile labour force. Building on Cresswell's idea of prosthetic citizenship (2009), I ask what these intimate and often messy relationships to technology can bring to the anthropological table.