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- Convenors:
-
Xu Liu
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Matteo Valoncini (Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna)
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Short Abstract:
While anthropology is invited to show the connectivity of interdisciplinary research, the qualitative approach struggles in knowledge dissemination. Drawing on medical anthropology's educational value, we welcome papers on the challenges of public engagement and transforming disciplinary boundaries.
Long Abstract:
Today’s health-related discourse is broader than the biomedical per se. However, problems regarding health matters and health professional development have grown with the extensive advancement of the production, promotion, and adoption of biomedical knowledge and techniques. First, the appeal of ‘humanising’ the knowledge and techniques of biomedicine leads to the broad transformation and development of social studies on medicine. Social studies of medicine and medical anthropology are increasingly engaging with the growing awareness of the complex theoretical, methodological, and ethical concerns.
However, the qualitative approach faces significant epistemological challenges within and beyond academia. Sometimes, it is seen as an add-on of biomedical epistemology rather than the reshaping of ontology. Especially, within the public sphere, it faces obstacles to broaden its approach to knowledge through communicative and educational tools, while the expertise of biomedical science and technology remains unchallenged.
We wish to put our inquiry into the positioning of medical anthropology, situated at the intersection of perceiving and interrogating the expanding development of health and medical sciences in concern of public engagement. We welcome papers drawing on empirical cases and conceptual, epistemological inquiries into medical anthropology, which could facilitate the discussions on, but not limited to the following questions: what is medical anthropology’s, or the general qualitative research’s role in the public sphere of biomedical knowledge? Regarding the educational value of a public anthropology approach to the realm of health and medicine, what could further resolve the challenging issues of public engagement and catalyse the transformation of disciplinary boundaries?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 28 June, 2024, -Jed Stevenson (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
What space remains for qualitative and ethnographic approaches in epidemiology and biomedicine? This paper explores this question from the point of view of a medical anthropologist who re-evaluated his relationship to the discipline when his child was diagnosed with a rare eye cancer.
Paper long abstract:
Healers and health professionals who take care as their vocation attend closely to their patients’ experiences, and in biomedical training ‘patient-centred approaches’ are routinely emphasised. Yet research in biomedicine remains dominated by methods and designs (e.g. randomised controlled trials) that effectively strip away lived experience and context in the interest of revealing supposedly universal knowledge about disease and treatment efficacy. What space remains for qualitative and ethnographic approaches? This paper explores this question from the point of view of a researcher trained in anthropology and epidemiology, who was compelled to re-evaluate his relationship to both disciplines when his son was diagnosed with a rare eye cancer (retinoblastoma).
Yasmynn Chowdhury (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I consider who we are doing medical anthropology for, and how our thought and practice might more meaningfully reach beyond the academic spaces within which our representations of bodies and health so often become circumscribed - towards a more public and engaged medical anthropology
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I reflect on: Who are we doing medical anthropology for? Who has access to the representations we produce, and who is benefitting from them? How might our thought and practice meaningfully reach beyond the academic spaces within which our representations of bodies and health so often become circumscribed - towards a more public and engaged medical anthropology? To answer these questions, I first consider how hegemonic ways of knowing in both biomedical and anthropological thought/practice interact with one another to shape and constrict the ways in which bodies and health/illness are un/re-made and ultimately delivered back to the people with whom we study, other researchers/practitioners, and general publics. In particular, I attend to the lingering presence of entrenched dualities and circumscriptions in both fields, including: epistemological distinctions between the body as known/object and knower/subject (Bichat; Sullivan 1996; Mol 2002); analytical distinctions between the body as inscribed/acted upon (representational approaches) and lived/active (phenomenological approaches) (Crossley 1996; Csordas 1994); and methodological divisions between ‘field’ (where ‘being in the world’ happens) and ‘desk’ (where ‘knowing about the world’ happens) (Chua and Mathur 2018; Mosse 2016). I then explore ways in which we might hold these dualities in tension with one another or collapse them in order to co-produce representations of bodies and health that are legible/recognisable and have affective, alleviatory, and perhaps even emancipatory potential for fellow researchers/practitioners of bodies and health, and most importantly, for the communities whose very bodies and health we engage.