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Paper short abstract

This proposal seeks to explore how the limits between health practices and political practices are being (re)made in local Prevention and Promotion of Health agencies in Madrid, giving careful consideration to the specific biopolitical rationality that these practices enact in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

This ethnographic research has been conducted in Madrid Salud, a local community-oriented health agency located in Madrid, Spain. This public agency drives prevention and promotion of health systems, seeking to reduce health inequalities within and between city districts. In Madrid Salud, health and social professionals work in collaboration with a complex set of entities: vaccines, district municipal boards, frindisk tests, and others, trespassing and redefining what it means to be a patient and a healthcare professional. This collaboration between human and non-human entities generates particular and intricate definitions of health and healthcare that are supported, negotiated, and resisted by regional and state health agencies and other community-oriented organizations in the city.

The goal of this research is to shed some light on the multiple ways that these practices shape new ways of understanding medical and health practices and to explore the opportunities and limitations of community-oriented health agencies in societies that are trying to deal with the presence of chronic illnesses, by bringing forward the intersections between bodies and political decisions and re-imagining the limits between health and disease in livable futures.

This research has been conducted as part of the Spanish National Research Agency I+D+I project CIMES (Cartographies, Itineraries and Mechanisms of Health Exclusion and Expulsion).

Keywords: Community-oriented health, Prevention and Promotion of health, Care practices.