Short Abstract

This panel explores how sociopolitical polarisation fractures infrastructures of care and reconfigures chronic care trajectories, reshaping relationships among patients, caregivers, communities and healthcare systems, with particular attention to insights from the Global South.

Long Abstract

This panel explores how processes of sociopolitical polarisation shape health systems and care trajectories, transforming experiences of chronicity and long-term illness across diverse contexts. Polarisation is not only a political or ideological phenomenon but also a process that reconfigures relations between illness experience, institutional practices, and moral worlds within healthcare. It deepens existing epistemic, political, economic, and ethical fractures, transforming infrastructures of care and therapeutic pathways within unstable settings.

The panel pays particular attention to the Global South, understood both as a region shaped by historical fractures rooted in colonial legacies, structural inequalities, and neoliberal restructuring of health and welfare, and as a vantage point from which critical perspectives on these global processes emerge. Comparative contributions from other contexts engaging with similar questions are also welcome. The aim is to explore how shifting policies, financial constraints, and competing imaginaries of health and citizenship impact healthcare infrastructures and trajectories by asking: How are chronicity and long-term care reconfigured in these precarious and shifting landscapes? How are relationships between patients, caregivers, and health and welfare institutions reshaped? What forms of exclusion, control, and resistance emerge?

We invite anthropological and ethnographic contributions informed by critical medical anthropology, social medicine, disability studies, decolonial studies, and related approaches from the Global South and beyond to examine how healthcare fractures are lived, negotiated, and contested within health communities and systems. We seek perspectives on chronic conditions, from mental health to rare and complex diseases, that reveal how structural, political, and moral conflicts shape care and reconfigure the relationships linking patients, caregivers, and health systems. By focusing on the everyday dimensions of care, this panel aims to foreground the creative, solidaristic, and reparative practices that emerge amid scarcity and conflict, offering ethnographic insights into how more cohesive and democratic forms of healthcare can be imagined and enacted.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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