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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, -Mary Mbuo (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM))
Paper short abstract:
Understanding why a woman or newborn died during the pregnancy journey is a crucial first step towards preventing similar deaths. This study explores how a discourse of hope is used to mobilize community members and health providers to participate in knowledge production to prevent future deaths.
Paper long abstract:
Background: Understanding exactly why a woman or new-born died during the pregnancy journey is a crucial first step towards preventing similar deaths. Maternal and perinatal death surveillance and response (MPDSR) is a global strategy that aims to reduce preventable maternal and perinatal mortality by involving stakeholders in the process of identifying the deaths, understanding why they occurred, and acting to prevent similar deaths in the future.
Community participation is theorized to be transformative for individuals and groups with expectations of improving health through collaborative learning. Participation in MPDSR is an emotive process for both bereaved family members and health providers. Yet, bereaved family members are invited to participatory spaces with health providers to review the past, overcome emotional barriers and learn so that they can prevent future mortality.
Aim: to explore strategies that are used for managing emotions as health providers and community members produce knowledge for preventing maternal and perinatal deaths.
Methods: This qualitative study explores the experiences of community members and health providers as they engage in MPDSR in Kenya.
Findings: A discourse of hope is used throughout the participation process. Hope has notions of giving agency to participants to overcome emotional barriers and learn from their lived experiences. Social structural barriers associated with power and knowledge production are negotiated and contested in the participatory process "where emotional wounds are opened... people just talk.... but nothing happens".
Conclusions: Vocabularies of hope are used to mobilize participants into participatory spaces for the prevention of future maternal and perinatal deaths.
Muriel Lamarque (Sheffield Hallam University)
Paper short abstract:
This work analyses the self-managed medical practices, community assistance networks and grassroot structures that arise among Latin American immigrants residing in Europe, as a response to the health inequalities and administrative abandonment that grow around the notion of legal citizenship
Paper long abstract:
The large-scale phenomenon of international migration is probably one of the main topics in the current international agenda, especially in times of profound social and geopolitical transformation. The response of national health systems to this event —especially in the Global North— still represents great limitations, failing (accidentally or deliberately) to provide adequate, egalitarian and affordable access to those people who do not qualify within the legal/normative schemes of citizenship.
Faced with this panorama of inequality and administrative abandonment, migrants develop self-managed practices, community assistance networks and informal structures (both local and transnational) for the distribution of medical goods and knowledge, with the purpose of solving or palliating health problems and improving life quality. The following work aims to analyse different forms and expressions of popular medicine that arise in contexts of international displacement, specially the collective structures that take shape to compensate the absence of equitable healthcare. Based on cultural principles of cooperation and reciprocity, the value of such grassroot initiatives is not only pragmatic in terms of its ability to resolve ailments, but also represents a source of consolation and mutual support, re-establishing the feeling of social and civic belonging in the midst of experiences of uprooting.
The results presented here form part of a long-term ethnographic research on the health/disease/care-neglect processes of Latin American people living in Spain, focusing particularly on the health identities forged around the concepts of inheritance, memory and resistance.
Armaan Alkazi (Univeristy of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the evolution of health care programs for the homeless in Delhi by an NGO. Analysing how the organization used data, insight and forms of situated knowledge to develop its components over the last 15 years and exploring why different modes of knowing are valued differentially.
Paper long abstract:
Homeless populations are considered to be in a paradoxical state of 'perpetual crises', as well as a 'hard to reach' population. This paper traces the evolution of health care programs for the homeless in Delhi by an influential NGO, the Centre for Equity Studies. It critically analyses how the program used data, insight and forms of situated knowledge to develop, measure and advocate for its interventions ; I observe how these different modes of knowing have been valued differentially, linking this process to regimes of political power. I go on to describe a form of politics that has evolved out of state engagement and estrangement, using ideas derived from value theory; contextualizing this by describing the complex and liminal space that many organizations in India occupy between NGO, social movement and political party. Through this process I centre how these processes affect homeless population. I end by arguing for greater complexity in the terms of debates around civil and political society in India and the developing world, proposing a form of analysis built from anthropological theories of value.