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- Convenors:
-
Costanza Torre
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Elizabeth Storer (LSE)
Georgina Pearson (Queen Margaret University)
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- Stream:
- Health, Disease and Wellbeing
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel asks how people navigate public health interventions across diverse African settings. How do public health discourses centred around individual responsibilities to protect oneself and others relate to people's complex moral, social and economic concerns?
Long Abstract:
This panel invites participants to examine how people navigate public health interventions which prioritise individualistic and often normative approaches to protection - a range of clinical tools, from pills, distancing requirements, quarantines and masks - within the socio-economic worlds of obligation in which they are imbricated. We are thus interested in the relationship between concepts of risk, abstracted clinical interventions and ever-changing familial and communal connections.
Responses to COVID-19 have emphasised the import of individuated action and personal responsibilities to prevent viral transmission. However, whilst the reification of the individual in processes of care has become particularly acute amidst the panic of viral spread, sparking heated discussion in the Global North, such trends are not new. Often integral to (and infiltrated within) neoliberal policies adopted in African states and conflict-affected places where state structures are non-extant, they have been evident in public health interventions for decades. In mitigating the spread of Ebola, West and Central African populations were forced to adopt lifestyle changes as individuals and families, often contravening communal practices. In the blooming field of Global Mental Health policy, psychotropic treatment is often pushed as a solution to mental distress, overlooking and silencing social ways of understanding and coping with affliction.
Grounded in investigations which depart from the contexts where people live out their everyday lives in diverse African settings, this panel explores how public health discourses centred around individual responsibilities to protect oneself and others relate to the complex moral, social and economic concerns of people navigating them.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ramifications of psychiatric treatment in displacement in relation to local understandings and practices of care in the refugee settlement of Palabek, northern Uganda.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the refugee settlement of Palabek, northern Uganda, explores the ramifications of psychiatric treatment in displacement in relation to local understandings and practices of care.
Uganda hosts more than a million South Sudanese refugees fleeing a brutal conflict. One of the most neglected refugee emergencies in the world, the humanitarian response in Uganda has been strongly shaped by the framework of “self-reliance” and “self-care”, mirrored in the frequent prescription of psychotropic medication in the settlements Health Centres.
The globalisation of psychiatry, particularly in the Global South, has often been contested as a fundamentally neo-colonial project (Summerfield, 2013; Mills, 2014). Furthermore, the configuration of psychiatric medications as embodied and hyper-individualising tools of care entrenched in a neoliberal political economy has recently been outlined in the literature (Klein and Mills, 2017; Davies, 2017).
This paper shows that among South Sudanese refugees, notions of care largely translate in the possibility of providing and participating in community life and hardship. In individualising social suffering and in the severely impairing side-effects it causes, psychotropic medication critically undermines local practices of care (both given and received) for South Sudanese refugees suffering from mental disorders.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Covid-19 riskscapes in Uganda and Malawi. Specifically, the analysis explores how communities constructed risk in relation to differential mobilities which emerged during lockdowns.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how populations across the African Great Lakes region construct riskscapes to understand the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Drawing on eleven months of remote fieldwork conducted in Uganda and Malawi, we show that the lens of mobility emerged as an important category of local analysis. As spatiality variegated lockdowns produced differential restrictions on movement, particular mobile bodies were understood as nodes of viral threat to be avoided. We complement the emergent literature which has emphasised the global racialisation of the Covid-19 pandemic, with insights into localised and often politicised notions of “othering” within diverse African societies. Our findings highlight the ways in which the relationship between viral risk and mobile bodies draws not just on grand geographies of continental demarcations, but also upon place-specific discriminations and inequalities. We argue that to look in depth at more localised renditions of risk, reveals otherwise neglected forms of discriminatory discourse and practice that remain out of view in the broader landscapes of pandemic geography. We conclude by relating our data on riskscapes to national approaches for testing Covid-19 cases. current approaches to testing and dissemination Covid-19 cases.
Paper short abstract:
Examining local understandings of, and responses to, hepatitis B in NW Uganda, we chart how knowledge was assembled on this new threat and communal memories invigorated by individualistic vaccination and testing campaigns. We suggest epidemic palimpsest as a framework to consider such responses.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores local understandings of, and response to, hepatitis B in West Nile, Uganda. We explore trajectories of action as a “new” virus was localised into the everyday world of West Nilers. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic and interview data we explain how the disease was understood locally, and understandings of the virus through different stages of government-led public health interventions regarding health information, testing and vaccination. At these different stages, we chart how knowledge was assembled in relation to a new viral threat, and how communal memories of trauma where invigorated by individualistic vaccination/ testing campaigns. To manage ambiguities vis-a-vis transmission and the progression of the disease, people understood hepatitis B in relation to experiences of HIV/AIDS. We propose a consideration for both “epidemic palimpsest” as a framework through which to consider communal responses to “new” viral conditions, as well as a nuanced approach to understanding the production of local knowledge.