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- Convenors:
-
Hansjörg Dilger
(Freie Universität Berlin)
Lucia Mair (University of Vienna)
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- Chair:
-
Maria Fernanda Olarte-Sierra
(University of Vienna)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 311
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
What is collaborative research in Medical Anthropology? How to have trusting and symmetrical relationships when addressing health-related inequalities and power relations? From a feminist and decolonial approach, we discuss the (im)possibilities of collaboration in Medical Anthropology research.
Long Abstract:
Over the past decades, Medical Anthropology has been reflecting on its methodological approaches, especially in contexts of marked inequality and power imbalance; as well as in contexts where our interlocutors’ survival and existence are at stake, and where they face suffering and devastation. How to do ethnographic research on conditions of suffering and inequality when addressing health-related issues without reproducing these conditions?
From a feminist and decolonial approach to research and knowledge practices, collaborative research figures as one possible way to counteract extractivist modes of fieldwork that feed into and perpetuate the long-lasting matrix of power. However, if we are to engage in ‘true’ collaboration, questions arise about the varied forms it may (and should) take. For instance, when does collaboration begin, and when and how does it end? How do different forms of knowledge enter into dialogue during fieldwork and become an integral part of the research findings? What can collaboration look like in the context of academic hierarchies, especially when it involves early-career researchers (including students)? How can ECRs with often low paid and short-term jobs engage in time- and resource-consuming collaboration without increasing their precarious status?
In this round-table, we plan to critically engage with collaborative methodologies which are ideally based on concrete ethnographic case studies. We aim to discuss and learn from the challenges of such methodologies that have the potential of decentering academic knowledge practices by giving equal room to diverse forms of knowledge production in matters of health, care, hope, body, life, and death.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper contributes insights from a collaborative ethnography between anthropologists and clinicians researching an innovation in NHS psychiatric crisis care named ‘Peer-supported Open Dialogue’. It speaks to the ethics of navigating asymmetrical relationships in healthcare and academic contexts.
Paper long abstract:
In 2019, the UK’s NHS implemented the world’s largest randomised controlled trial of ‘Peer-supported Open Dialogue’ (POD), a Finnish innovation from the 1980s advocating a social network approach to psychiatric treatment. An ESRC-funded anthropological study (APOD) launched simultaneously as independent but complementary to the RCT, comprising clinicians who trained as ethnographers and anthropologists who trained as Open Dialogue practitioners, of which I am one. We spent three years in the ‘field’ across two RCT sites/community mental health teams, delivering and researching POD. We also incorporated dialogical principles into our collaborative analytical and writing processes.
Improvising a collaborative methodology enabled multi-sited research and the recording of experiences from different subject and disciplinary positions, although this demanded the navigation of multiple sets of relationships between researchers, supervisors, co-practitioners, and patients.
Being the only PhD student and BAME member of the APOD research team marked me as different from the perspective of NHS interlocuters, based on preconceived racialised and gendered roles; perhaps it was inevitable that I aligned with NHS clinicians who were also positioned at the lower ends of organisational hierarchy. How do such alliances induce possibilities and challenges in collaboration?
Significantly, how did these asymmetries translate into therapeutic and research relationships with patients? Being a former patient (peer) myself might counteract ethical quandaries in these relationships to some extent, but what of their continuity? As an NHS practitioner, circumventing boundaries is frowned upon but as an anthropologist, surely it is unethical to abandon patients after using them for ‘data’?
Paper short abstract:
Peer support in mental health is a vital case study in participatory collaborative research. As peer movements offer reparative alternatives to institutional psychiatric knowledge, the inclusion of peer researchers is imperative. Diffractive workshopping is a means for navigating such complexities.
Paper long abstract:
Participatory collaborative research argues that individuals who have historically been the subjects of research should be actively included as producers of research themselves. Peer support in mental health is a vital case study in this context. Peer professionals are individuals with lived experiences as mental health service users who have been trained to support others experiencing psychiatric crises. Peer support offers a reparative alternative to institutional psychiatric knowledge regimes, making the inclusion of peer researchers a methodological imperative. While the inclusion of peer researchers generates diverse multi-professional teams, it also surfaces conflicts regarding how knowledge is produced, the hierarchies embedded in research institutions and protocols, and how the expectations placed on peer researchers risk universalising “lived experience” as a token category. To this roundtable, I offer my firsthand experience as an anthropologist in these spaces of methodological and political transformation over the last twelve years, highlight the challenges I have encountered in developing proposals for participatory collaborative research, and outline a methodological framework for collaborative knowledge production grounded in the work of feminist scholars of science and society. This framework draws on the scholarship of Karen Barad and Isabelle Stengers to develop “diffractive workshopping” as a “slow science” that allows multi-professional research teams to not just approach encounters in the field from a collaborative perspective, but to think divergent positionalities through each other in deliberate and explicit ways that take seriously the dynamics and histories of research team members as factors in the production of knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a participatory film project with a Williche Community (2010-2012) and an interinstitutional multimodal research on food and health with a Rural School (2022-2024) I discuss how collaboration in medical anthropology is complicated by coexisting authoritative and emancipatory moments.
Paper long abstract:
Collaborative, participative, action-research, feminist and critical methodologies have been central to my research on health, care and life over the last 15 years in the South of Chile. Through facing the many challenges of collaborative projects within different healthcare initiatives, with different institutions and people, I have moved from a pretty naïve to a more nuanced engagement with collaboration as a method, as an ideal and as a real-life practice.
In this paper I aim to discuss some of the pitfalls of collaboration in medical anthropology drawing on two ethnographical projects that took place in the Island of Chiloé in separate times and places with different groups of people: A participatory film project as part of an ethnography of a Complementary Health Initiative with a Williche Community (2010-2012) and an interinstitutional multimodal research project on food and health with a Rural School (2022-2024). In the first one, I was myself a doctoral student, in the second one I am part of a team of more or less established researchers and ECRs. Being quite different in its methodological proposal and institutional constrictions, both projects addressed health-related issues intending to counter epistemic and social inequality by including diverse forms of knowledge production and experimenting with ways of doing health-research as a caring and loving practice. In both cases collaboration had to be negotiated and transformed in the research process. It ended up including at times pretty vertical or authoritative practices along with some horizontal and emancipatory moments.
Paper short abstract:
This roundtable contribution discusses the possibilities and limits of collaborative ethnography, based on a project about the lives and labors of healthcare workers in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) in the US during Covid-19.
Paper long abstract:
This roundtable contribution discusses the possibilities and limits of collaborative ethnography, based on a project about the lives and labors of healthcare workers in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) in the US during Covid-19.
The project's collaborative ethnographers included a medical anthropologist and three ICU physicians, each bound by a peculiar and productive dilemma: What does it mean when the trained ethnographer cannot enter the space of ethnographic observation? Due to hospital visitation restrictions during the pandemic, the medical anthropologist always found himself "on the other side of the screen" -- that is, put in relation to his collaborators via Zoom, but rarely in person. Moreover, the site of research -- the hospital ICU -- was off-limits to someone deeply committed to up-close hospital ethnography.
What does it mean to remove close observation from one's ethnographic habits, and what implications does this have for collaborative medical anthropological research in clinical spaces and beyond? The presentation will reflect on this question in light of project insights, as well as emergent conversations in medical anthropology and the anthropology of science about the power relations inherent to collaborative research work.