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- Convenors:
-
Magdalena Góralska
(University of Warsaw)
Chandni Shyam (Utrecht University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The pandemic has challenged healthcare systems across the world, straining many by exposing their weak sides in a globally unprecedented manner. This panel brings together researchers that provide an insight into bottom-up responses to various healthcare crises, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Long Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought attention to the global injustice in the access to treatments and medication, raising questions of how free market economy shapes futures of those living in countries with a less robust or stable healthcare. Recently, the most vivid inequality is the one of the access to coronavirus vaccination, but there are many others, on both global, regional, and local levels across the world. Healthcare systems are complex entities, entangled in power relations of socio-cultural relaties they are part of. Their malfunctioning is resisted in a variety of ways that address different issues, whether systemic or executive.
This panel invites papers that inquire into ways of grassroots initiatives, bottom-upstrategies and individual practices that aim to contradict malfunctionings of given healthcare systems. We wish to bring together researchers that study various responses to healthcare crisis either by policy makers, ngos, medical practitioners or patients. In particular, we invite papers that investigate local manifestations of global inequalities or global health problems, such as a problem of access to pharmaceuticals, global mental healthcare crisis or female foeticide crisis.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper presents preliminary results of a multi-method action-research that aims to tackle health inequalities in the city of Bologna. From an anthropological perspective, it focuses on inequalities produced by the pandemic and public responses (formal and informal) put in place to address them.
Paper long abstract:
Covid-19, as a ‘global social fact’, was a disruptive event, leaving no part of society untouched. However, several studies show that the impact of the pandemic is unequal and the harshest consequences have been on already marginalized people. From an anthropological perspective, this paper discusses health inequalities exacerbated and/or produced by the pandemic in 3 neighborhoods of the city of Bologna (Italy), as well as interventions and practices arranged that appear to promote equity and collective health. Data were collected within an action-research project (2017-ongoing) that combines epidemiological and ethnographic methods with the aims to know the distribution of inequalities in the city and to support actions to tackle them. Results show how the virus and the measures for its containment have affected the most vulnerable social groups (informal workers, single-parent families, etc.), while producing new forms of vulnerability (people more exposed to infection for work reasons). The difficulties in leveling out these inequalities through institutional response seem attributable to deep and historical gaps of our welfare and healthcare systems. Data also shows how, particularly during the first pandemic wave and its protracted lockdown, there were unprecedented forms of activation on the part of citizens and some healthcaresectors, illustrating some potential of the current public institutions. A focus will be devoted to the ways in which proximity has been rethought by the social, health and welfare services, thus to the related consequences in relation to the different segments of the local population.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with grassroots responses to Covid-19 health crisis in Zambia. Attention is focused on how the initiatives of traditional health practitioners, Pentecostal and spirit-type churches cooperate with both non-governmental and state health organizations in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
The paper deals with grassroots responses to Covid-19 health crisis in urban setting of Zambia, namely the capital Lusaka and Livingstone, where the ethnographic research was carried out in January and February 2022. Attention is focused primarily on how the particular grassroots initiatives of traditional health practitioners, Pentecostal and spirit-type churches cooperate with both non-governmental and state health organizations in tackling the health crisis of Covid-19 in contemporary Zambia. Healers and pastors act as gatekeepers of the local communities and cooperate with health institutions by disseminating medical knowledge on Covid-19 among members of local communities in poverty-stricken compounds. The same actors share and internalise local cultural perceptions of Covid-19 that radically differ from state-orchestrated medical explanations and recommendations, that are often unattainable to those communities. The paper attempts to show on specific ethnographic examples how these state, civic and community-level coping strategies differ but at the same time interact and negotiate within the contested realities – that of medical and spiritual conceptualisation of the disease and pandemic. The paper also focuses on how this "politics of the commons" that brings these initiatives together responds to situational threats to survival or well-being. We argue that traditional cognitive schemes and local cultural epistemologies (based on moral economy of witchcraft and spiritual conceptualisation of misfortune that are activated in times of crisis) are not necessarily counterproductive to the state-health politics but might be interpreted as creative and co-productive strategies in both systemic and executive responses to Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates people living with HIV/AIDS's (PLWHA) access to antiretroviral drugs during China's COVID-19 outbreaks. While the official health sector has the primary control of PLWHA's records and treatments, civil organisations for HIV/AIDS care take a more active role in this process.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates PLWHA's access to antiretroviral drugs during China's handling of COVID-19 outbreaks, taking a case study of PLWHA's experiences in Xi'an's lockdown from the end of 2021. Utilising social media group observations, ethnographic interviews, and discourse analysis, I record the voluntary movements of drug deliveries facilitated by local civil organisations for HIV/AIDS care, reflecting on a contrast between an 'autonomy' at the civil level and the official health sector's expected role. For HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, China's official health sector has taken a dominant position in policymaking and the control of resources. The top-down channel of health-related knowledge production and policy implementation of pandemics intends to enact the governmentality with the total control of biopower, overseeing the population as an integral subject of health needs. Only the official can define high-risk population groups, designate the corresponding measures and distribute resources. This system failed to realise the PLWHA's need for regular access to antiretroviral drugs when the government implemented a universal, compulsory lockdown, as the restrictions of movements only considered eliminating the COVID-19 transmission. In this context, while the official still controls the decisive resources, including PLWHA's records and treatment drugs, the civil organisations took a more active role in communicating the information and ensuring the basic drug supplies for PLWHA. Compared with the official's initial ignorance of PLWHA's health needs, the bottom-up responses demonstrate that people's proactivity and autonomy of actions could become vital for the expressions of individualities within a top-down, authoritative mode of health administration.
Paper short abstract:
Shanghainese deaf and blind persons access medical services through a government-driven volunteer program. The description of experiences shared by both, the users and the project's volunteers, aims to understand how institutional efforts might be parallel to care or go against it.
Paper long abstract:
Chinese deaf and blind persons live in constant crisis to access healthcare, in particular, and care, in general. This is particularly true for elder visually and aurally impaired people who barely appear in urban public spaces or whose socialisation is reduced to relations among themselves. The China Disabled Persons’ Federation (Can Lian, in mandarin) has organised a “bridge” project in which volunteer groups assist disabled persons (mostly, blind and deaf) to provide them with the possibility to visit hospitals and have medical consultations. I am interested in the relationship between the Federation and the subjects of their project. What people are they reaching out to? What are their approach methods? How do the involved parts understand and deliver accessibility and care? The paper is based on over a year of ethnographic work on the entanglements between blind and deaf groups with government and grassroots organisations in Shanghai, China. I offer not only a description of particular encounters in the field but also an invitation to analysis. From what research participants experienced, it seems that sometimes institutional efforts are parallel to care; sometimes they might crash against it.