Short Abstract

This panel explores how early-career scholars in medical anthropology inherit, negotiate, and challenge the discipline’s intellectual legacies, balancing continuity with rupture in re-imagining health, care, and epistemic futures.

Long Abstract

In recent decades, medical anthropology has built on seminal works and theoretical frameworks that continue to shape research on health, care, and power. While these foundations provide critical tools, they also risk reproducing epistemic assumptions, disciplinary power-relations and norms rooted in colonial, Western or institutional legacies.

This panel invites early- and mid-career scholars to reflect on the metaphor of “standing on the shoulders of giants”: how do we inherit, negotiate, and (re)work these intellectual legacies in contemporary anthropological work on medicine, health systems, multilingual care settings, and epistemic justice? We seek contributions that explore questions such as: What does it mean to build on classics while avoiding mere reproduction of disciplinary orthodoxies? How do researchers address the tension between continuity (using recognized frameworks) and rupture (decolonising, re-imagining, subverting)? How do these tensions play out in fieldwork, empirical analysis, theorisation, and publication?

Empirical papers, methodological reflections and conceptual essays are all welcome, especially those showing how medical anthropology engages with intersectional power, multilingual/multi-cultural care, epistemic futures, and modes of collaboration that challenge established hierarchies. By bringing together diverse voices, the panel aims to generate a collective discussion on how the next generation of medical anthropologists can shape epistemic futures, informed by the past, but not constrained by its blind spots.

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