Paper short abstract:

This paper explores biosocial interfaces in incidence, severity, and death due to Valley Fever; the ecological, physiological, and immunological mechanisms and the social, racial and regional stratifications that serve as their counterparts.

Paper long abstract:

Coccidioidomycosis, colloquially referred to as Valley Fever, affects residents in the southwestern United States, northern Mexico and South America. An estimated 150,000 people in the US become infected annually via inhalation of spores from the soil-dwelling fungi. This can lead to chronic lung infection, meningitis, or death. Southwestern states are currently experiencing among the highest incidence rates of coccidioidomycosis ever recorded. Large construction projects, such as the creation of solar farms, and earthquakes that disturb the soil increase risk of infection. While most cases resolve spontaneously, up to 40% are severe enough to require antifungal treatment and many spread beyond the lungs.

Scientists argue that critical gaps in understanding have hindered public health response to Valley Fever, including how dust, pathogen, and individual risk factors interact to determine disease incidence, as well as how environmental factors influence the distribution of the pathogen and dust. No new treatments for coccidioidomycosis have been approved in the United States in nearly 40 years; the number of investigators studying the disease is very small and there is little pharmaceutical company interest in developing treatments. The fact that the areas most affected in California are also the poorest communities in the state, and home to the state’s prisons, may also have influenced the lack of attention to this devastating disease. In this paper I draw upon interviews with scientists who study the disease to explore biosocial interfaces; the ecological, physiological, and immunological mechanisms and the social, racial and regional stratifications that serve as their counterparts.

Paper short abstract:

A transdisciplinary project seeking to enhance the protective capacities of earthen building materials--the humble brick-provides this paper with a prompt to consider how anthropology's thermal imagination might be expanded to better meet the challenges of global health in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

Mosquitoes are exquisitely temperature-sensitive. Thriving in warmer and more humid conditions, mosquitoes’ ectothermic biology has made them sentinels for the disease risk in an era of climate change, prompting calls for invasive species surveillance and ever-more expansive programmes of chemoprophylactic control. This paper explores another avenue to threat mosquitoes pose, a transdisciplinary project seeking to redesign the ‘humble brick’ as a tool for public health. The most commonly-used building artifact in the world, bricks are cheap, durable, modular, low-maintenance, energy-efficient, and have great potential for recycle and reuse. Those properties present an opportunity for the prevention of mosquito-borne diseases—a field of global health practice focused on household protection but dominated by chemical tools that offer little by way of material improvement to local living conditions. Locally sourced, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing, the brick, in contrast, can be enfolded into residential construction processes and priorities, providing the foundations for a more expansive imaginary of healthy and climate-resilient living. More than a vector control tool, transforming the humble brick can rearticulate aspirations for social progress within an enterprise circumscribed by humanitarian commitments—a global health modern better equipped to meet the needs of our collective thermal future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how the financialization of pandemic risk through World Bank bonds interacts with socio-ecological variables. The paper aims to bridge the gap between high-level social variables identified in ethnographic studies and nuanced environmental conditions.

Paper long abstract:

The World Bank's Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF) introduced groundbreaking pandemic bonds to address pandemic risks. This paper examines the interplay of private financial capital during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing insights from ethnographic fieldwork in Washington D.C. and Senegal. The study explores the nexus of various actors—World Bank, investors, governments, implementing partners, health systems, and communities—brought together through the financialization of pandemic risk.

Aligned with the panel's theme on recognizing social determinants in environmental health, the research investigates how the financialization of pandemic risk through World Bank bonds interacts with socio-ecological variables. It goes beyond simplistic conceptualizations of 'the social,' addressing the complexity of environmental conditions in everyday life. By considering the dynamic interplay of socio-ecological variables, the paper aims to bridge the gap between high-level social variables identified in epidemiological studies and nuanced environmental conditions revealed through ethnographic research.

The analysis explores the relationships produced by World Bank pandemic bonds, examining their impact on urban/rural/developing environments, climates, and health. By scrutinizing collaboration within this financial framework, the study contributes to the ongoing discourse on biosocial research. Aligned with the panel's focus on transdisciplinary engagement, it emphasizes the need for more nuanced, collaborative approaches to examine the socio-environmental. The paper aims to illuminate how anthropology can enhance biosocial epidemiologic and biomedical research, fostering more effective interventions and policy frameworks for ecological health.

Paper short abstract:

Investigating healthcare disparities, this study, utilising Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), emphasises transdisciplinary approaches for informed biosocial interventions, addressing socio-environmental complexities to enhance health outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

This study critically examines healthcare disparities within the rural and indigenous communities of Jharkhand, India, shedding light on the intricate structural factors contributing to the state's poor health outcomes. With a significant tribal population and ranking as one of India's least healthy and second-poorest states, Jharkhand serves as a poignant case study. Utilising the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) method in villages, the research navigates the complex interplay of inadequate sanitation infrastructure, limited access to clean water, and cultural barriers affecting healthcare services.

Aligned with the conference theme, the study underscores the imperative for more effective transdisciplinary engagement, acknowledging the socio-environmental complexities in urban, rural, and developing environments. The findings contribute to the ongoing dialogue on the limitations of conceptual simplifications in defining 'the social,' echoing the conference's call to move beyond empirically thin measurements. Emphasising collaboration, the study aligns with the conference's goal of exploring how anthropologists can contribute to bio-social informed ecological health and policy interventions.

This research, grounded in a community-driven approach, advocates for inclusive participation, particularly through approaches like Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs). By unpacking healthcare disparities and their underlying causes, the study aims to inform targeted interventions, striving not only to minimise existing disparities but also to contribute to the broader global agenda of achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

Keywords: Healthcare Disparity, PRA, SDG, Socio-environmental Complexities, Transdisciplinary Engagement

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the emerging concept of the exposome, as the ‘environmental compliment to the genome’ (Miller 2021). Using new data on urban violence, gender, and mental health in London, we explore the possibilities and limitations of the exposome and its utility for interdisciplinary research.

Paper long abstract:

The ‘exposome’ has been heralded by frontrunners in the fields of public health, cancer research, and epidemiology (Miller 2021; Wild 2005) as a framework with the potential to unify the ‘omics’ sciences into a complete structure for investigating environmental health. Defined as all the exposures (social, behavioural, and environmental) experienced over the lifecourse, ‘the exposome’ aims to provide a complete picture of health-related exposures occurring outside and inside the body, and the complex ways they are related (Neufcort et al 2022). However, measurements and definitions of the social in exposome research are often conceptually simplistic, empirically thin and lack an understanding of the dynamic and situated complexities of social variables (Neufcourt et al 2022; Roberts 2017; Vineis 2022). As such there is a danger exposomic research will end up ‘cancelling out the social’, with significant consequences for health policy.

We seek to problematise the ‘exposome’ using preliminary data on urban violence and mental health among young women in London. Drawing on interdisciplinary research into how urban violence is numerically measured, statistically modelled and predicted, alongside the everyday impacts of neighbourhood violence on participants’ use of green space (Han et al 2018), their everyday emotions (Duru 2019), and movement through the city (Riaño-Alcalá 2008), our research uses ‘bioethnographic’ mapping methods to symmetrically capture and analyse both epidemiological and ethnographic data. In this paper, we will reflexively critique these two contrasting mapping modalities (statistical and ethnographic) to interrogate the claims made by the exposome for a totalising framework of ecological health.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the adoption of 'nature-based' health promotion initiatives on the Scottish islands of Skye and Raasay. I examine the therapeutic use of the natural environment, situating my analysis within broader conceptual and historical debates concerning the use and value of nature.

Paper long abstract:

In Scotland, significant attention has been afforded to the so-called ‘natural’ environment as a way to mitigate health inequalities. Initiatives like ‘Our Natural Health Service’ draw upon an ever-expanding body of research documenting the salutogenic effects of exposure to green space (Hartig et al., 2014). Taking a critical biosocial approach, I explore what is meant by ‘nature’ and how such meanings shape healing practices (Yates-Doerr, 2020)? Why is it that ‘nature’ - framed simultaneously as an anxiolytic aesthetic resource (Ulrich, 1993) and a space of sensorial enrichment (Janssen et al., 2018) - is imagined to exert such radical effects on individual bodies and populations? In this paper, I consider the adoption of nature walks and ‘forest bathing’ - sensory immersion in a wooded environment (Hansen et al., 2017) - as health promotion initiatives on the Hebridean islands of Skye and Raasay. I ask, how is ‘nature’ defined and understood in such practices, and how is the environment incorporated through acts of emplaced movement and interspecies interaction (Ingold, 2000)? I intend to complexify public health frames concerning access to green space and its resulting effects on the body by deconstructing the discursive practices by which nature is transformed into a healing instrument. Furthermore, I invoke the Gaelic concept of dùthchas (Ní Mhathúna, 2019) to examine the diverse means by which histories of dispossession, imperial entanglement, and more-than-human ecologies come to shape both the textures of local landscapes and the means by which these are apprehended somatically.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a generative problematization of psychiatric research and two ethnographic case studies on everyday life in Berlin (Germany), I focus on fleeting, ecological encounters and discuss methodological implications for inter- and transdisciplinary urban mental health research.

Paper long abstract:

Postgenomic shifts within epidemiological psychiatry constitute overlaps of interests between psychiatric and ethnographic research (Fitzgerald et al. 2016). This has motivated social scientists to develop ecological perspectives to grasp the relations of urban life and mental health (Bister et al. 2016; Kirmayer 2019; Manning et al. 2022). Such an ontologically grounded analytical perspective enables collaborative empirical research between the social sciences and psychiatry, because it is developed from and simultaneously goes beyond merely deconstructing psychiatry (Bieler/Niewöhner 2018; Winz/Söderström 2021).

Psychiatric research has established a causal link between urban living and severe mental health problems (Vassos et al. 2012). Current studies focus the ecological concentration of mental health risks in neighborhoods explaining how differences within a city emerge due to social injustices and how they are mediated by social processes, particularly social capital and social isolation (Manning 2019; Rose 2019).

Based on a generative problematization of these findings and two ethnographic case studies on everyday life in a district of Berlin (Germany), I will broaden the focus of current urban mental health research: Rather than focusing on strong social ties measured via personal networks of individuals, I will take into account fleeting, more-than-human encounters and how they constitute neighborhood atmospheres. I propose the processual notion of encountering as a boundary object to assemble heterogeneous actors – psychiatric and ethnographic researchers, political stakeholders, urban planners, mental health care clients and others (Griesemer/Star 1989; Rose/Fitzgerald 2022) – and I discuss which necessary methodological developments arise from this.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on 5 years of interdisciplinary work I describe the translation of case histories from a respite shelter into a set of epidemiological indicators and reflect on how they may sharpen influential theories from both anthropology and epidemiology.

Paper long abstract:

I draw on five years of interdisciplinary work with a group of epidemiologists, clinicians, public health officials, civil society organizations as an anthropologist working with street populations in Delhi. I describe the translation of case histories taken in a respite shelter into a set of epidemiological indicators and reflect on how they may sharpen theories from both anthropology and epidemiology.

The case history forms designed by an anthropologist covered questions ranging from a patient’s journey to the street, when they fell sick, where they went for care, and their current forms of social support. While designed to meet the goals of a public health program for street populations, these documents allowed us to generate a set of social factors that influence important epidemiological indicators such as treatment completion, morbidity, mortality etc. These individual case histories read together generate pathways between ill health, social isolation, living conditions and adverse childhood experiences, to name a few. The pathways start to give us an emergent, situated set of ‘structures’, that can give definition to ideas of ‘structural violence’(Farmer 2004), or the constitutive parts of a socio-ecological framework (Krieger 2011). I chart how tensions remain in interpreting a fuzzy social document like the case history—for example, in how to translate different forms of social isolation into numerical form. However, I argue that the case history provides a compelling document that can be produced at scale, which both anthropologists and epidemiologists can use to draw the relationships between unequal social structures and ill health.