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P50


Locating anthropology in qualitative Global Health research 
Convenors:
Isabelle Lange (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Rodney Reynolds (University College, London)
Location:
JUB-117
Start time:
9 September, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/London
Session slots:
1

Short Abstract:

This panel invites research, methodological and speculative papers that explore how qualitative research across the domain of global health becomes anthropology and leads to nuanced understandings of how communities and people emerge from, stand-out against and help shape statistical imaginaries.

Long Abstract:

As a field, 'Global Health' integrates several overlapping, but different social imaginaries. Each of these principally emerges from a specific discipline and draws on that discipline's methods and language. By bringing social and medical sciences together, global health uses research to try and shape policy and practice in diverse social, cultural, economic and health settings. The ways in which research from these fields functions in collaboration with political and administrative processes serve to nudge the putative liberal subjects of modern states towards certain behaviors and away from others. The achievement or deficit of these efforts and their effects is most often articulated via quantitative results. Talal Asad argues that qualitative experiences and research in such a world may be strategically positioned to test how thoroughly the values associated with the imaginaries of quantitative methodologies and statistics have been embodied by local populations and inform their social practices. Recognition within global health that knowing why people do things matters as much as knowing what they do has created the opportunity for qualitative research to contribute to global health. While qualitative research experience may inform anthropology, it is not congruent with it. So, where is anthropology located within global health's evidence base and how is it to be found? This panel invites research, methodological and speculative papers that explore how qualitative research across the domain of global health becomes anthropology and leads to more nuanced understandings of how communities and people emerge from, stand-out against and help shape statistical imaginaries.

Accepted papers:

Session 1