Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper, I explore the potentialities and limitations of medical anthropological praxis in unsettling hegemonic biomedical discourses on health/illness and the suffering body within contexts of forced displacement, and implications of such a shift for reimaginations of systems of care.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I seek to explore the potentialities and limitations of medical anthropological praxis in unsettling hegemonic biomedical discourses on bodies, health, and suffering within contexts of forced displacement. Drawing on a systematic literature review, policy analysis, insights from prior research with resettled refugees through a quantitative/public health lens, and preliminary observations from my current doctoral fieldwork through an ethnographic/medical anthropological lens, I reflect on how the objective, material, biological, and externally knowable suffering body has become the primary site for the production of ‘truth’ in contexts of displacement and asylum-seeking. I examine how knowledge production regarding the body of the forced migrant becomes circumscribed within authorised and inaccessible spaces, thus divesting refugees of the epistemic capacity to know themselves and their wellbeing. I consider how quantitative and population-level constructions of refugee health are co-constituted with regimes of health care and humanitarian protection for refugees, critical for rendering refugees visible, legible, and thus governable, and how such paradigms may contribute to failures to alleviate or even exacerbations of illness/suffering. I then consider how medical anthropology might contribute to rethinking the theoretical and epistemological parameters through which we might comprehend body-environment entanglements and aetiological origins of challenges to health/wellbeing in refugee communities. Even more radically, I wish to consider the potentiality of the discipline along with co-productive/collaborative methodologies in restoring the epistemic agency of the subjective/experiential body of the refugee to know itself, and the implications of such an epistemological shift for reimagining systems of care and alleviating preventable illness/suffering.