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- Convenors:
-
Sahra Gibbon
(University College London (UCL))
Carrie Ryan (University College London)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 21 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic is undoubtedly a biosocial phenomenon. This panel reflect on how biosocial medical anthropology and related cross-disciplinary engagements might best align concepts, tools and methods that are responsive to these changing social and biological dynamics.
Long Abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic is undoubtedly a biosocial phenomenon that requires a much more meaningful alignment between the biological and social that can address, understand and intervene on these complex interactions and also develop appropriate interventions. This is apparent as much in the growing relevance of the Anthropocene in the emergence of the coronavirus and its likely zoonotic origin, as it is in the co-evolution of social lives and new variants. But it is also evident in how the pandemic (and effects to mitigate it )has unmasked and underlined the uneven embodied effects of social inequalities such as gender, race, income and age. Yet despite the emerging biosocial reality of the pandemic there are significant challenges in developing cross disciplinary dialogue, methods and research that can address and examine these dynamics.
In this panel we invite contributors to reflect on how biosocial medical anthropology and related cross-disciplinary engagements might better align specific concepts, tools, methods and methodological designs that are responsive to the lived changing social and biological realities of the pandemic. Papers might for example consider the following questions: What is the place of ethnography in pandemic focused biosocial research? How can evolutionary and ethnographic perspectives be aligned? How can archival and longitudinal data be better integrated into biosocial medical anthropology research on the pandemic? What are the potentials and pitfalls of translating knowledge and understanding across different disciplinary vernaculars?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 21 January, 2022, -Ishtiaque Ahmed Levin (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that biosocial medical Anthropology can construct a new conception of the social to illuminate emergent socio-natural processes and chart a path through them to meet the theoretical challenges of the Virocene.
Paper long abstract:
Moving beyond the dichotomy of nature-culture, the Anthropocene has emerged as one of the most important scientific concepts of the new millennium. The Covid-19 pandemic is the concrete manifestation of the ontological insecurities of the Anthropocene. The pandemic demonstrates that the nonhumans can turn into influential agents of history who are capable of disrupting the social order. Therefore, the conception of social life has been transformed as it has become deeply entangled within the dynamics of the planet itself. In this transformed theoretical terrain, how should biosocial medical Anthropology respond to the challenges posed by the Virocene? This paper argues that the presuppositions of medical Anthropology about the social need to be revisited. The social has to be understood as the product of a dynamic earth system, self-organizing over deep time. A transdisciplinary approach is required to reconceptualize the social which is able to cope with the planetary challenges posed by the Virocene. We need to see the social forces through a planetary lens to understand the complex interaction between humanity and the inhuman forces of the planet. The paper argues that we need a paradigm shift in medical Anthropology to understand humanity’s altered relation with other species. From a multidisciplinary perspective, the paper contends that medical Anthropologists should allow planetary forces to redefine the very conception of the social. Through this theoretical endeavor, the paper argues, biosocial medical Anthropology can illuminate emergent socio-natural processes, and chart a path through them to meet the theoretical challenges of the Virocene.
Dalia Iskander (University College London (UCL))
Paper short abstract:
What happens when drones, hand-held GPSs and cameras meet forest habitats, mosquitoes, macaques and people? I reflect on the experience of working in a large multi-disciplinary team mapping malaria ‘risk’ in Malaysian Borneo and the implications for understanding zoonotic diseases like Covid-19.
Paper long abstract:
I describe how an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers working on the MONKEYBAR project deployed a range of technologies try to understand how the macro-movements of environments, forests and habitats intersected with the micro-movement of people, macaques and mosquitoes to shape how zoonotic malaria was transmitted and spread in Malaysian Borneo. Carried by long and pig-tailed macaques, Plasmodium knowlesi is a primate malaria transmitted to people through bites from infected Anopheles leucosphyrus mosquitoes and is now a significant cause of malaria in Malaysia and across the South East Asia region. Drones, modelling data and GPS trackers were used to gaze on zoonotic disease transmission dynamics from above while digital cameras, GPS trackers and interviews reversed the gaze from below. Put together, locally-relevant risk maps created from the data gave us a multi-scalar, multi-temporal, multi-species view of the complex interactions that coalesced here to create ‘conditions of pathogenic possibility’. (Brown and Kelly, 2014). Of significance is the way in which ‘mappers’ approached and interpreted the issue of ‘risk’ from different experiential, disciplinary, spatial, temporal and species vantage points and how these tensions were resolved (or not) to come to collective elucidations of the fuzzy notion of ‘risk’. What became clear was that ‘risky’ places did not exist as fixed areas but rather had a mobility of their own as they emerged and receded from view as a result of an array of movements from those implicated in the mapping process. I reflect on what can be cleaned in relation to Covid-19.
Carrie Ryan (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how ethnography might align with other disciplinary methods to make sense of care home mortalities during covid-19 that were not caused by covid-19 disease itself, but rather the social response to covid-19: lockdown.
Paper long abstract:
Older adults are one of the most at-risk populations for severe and fatal covid-19 disease. To protect at-risk older adults from covid-19 disease, many countries imposed harsh lockdown measures on care homes. Despite these strong measures, covid-19 disease ran rampant in care homes, causing mass deaths and eliciting much scholarly attention. Though the focus on the rapid spread of covid-19 disease in care homes has shed critical light on how politically and economically unsupported care homes are, scholars are now increasingly turning their attention to an under-studied, yet vast amount of care home mortalities during covid-19 that were not caused by covid-19 disease, but rather covid-19's social response: lockdown. These deaths are being called ‘confinement syndrome’ (Diamantis et al. 2020), which involves the synergistic interaction between: dehydration and malnutrition; physical and functional decline; exacerbation of chronic medical conditions and mental health disorders; cognitive decline and delirium; worsening of responsive behaviours; loneliness and social isolation; and psychological distress, depression, and anxiety. While care home workers suggest that confinement syndrome has been more deleterious than covid-19 itself, the ethical dangers of conducting research in care homes during covid-19 have made it difficult to study this phenomenon in depth. In this paper, then, I will draw on an ethnography in care homes pre-covid-19 and a recent experience on an interdisciplinary ageing research team to think through how ethnography might align with other disciplinary methods in future to capture the biosocial, ongoing impact of lockdown on older adults.
Aaron Parkhurst (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between chronic illness, the human body and the built environment in the context of Covid-19 mitigations in London and the UK more broadly. How is health constructed through quotidian movement, and how are these quotidian structures affected by the pandemic?
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between the human body and the built environment in the context of Covid-19 mitigations in London and the UK more broadly. The rates of chronic illness, including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, have been rising steadily in the UK for the last two decades. However, the experience of living through changing and often chaotic labour and lifestyle structures the last 20 months offers new challenges for social and public health scientists to unpack new biosocial complexity in combating these rising rates of chronic illness. The effects of Covid mitigation strategies within the sciences have been, so far, largely speculative, focusing on the general physical and mental health of the individual in lockdown, the absence of wider care provision during the most virulent months of the Covid-19 outbreaks, and resource limitations in overwhelmed public health systems. Following Emily Mendenhall’s (2012, 2016) calls to think ‘beyond comorbidity’, and Emily Yates Doerr recent critiques of social determinants of Health (2020), this paper reconsiders chronic illness from the perspective of an Anthropology of the body and the City in the aftermath of Covid-19 lockdowns. Such a consideration begs questions on how health is maintained and constructed through quotidian living, and asks further questions on the complexity of how these quotidian structures are affected by the pandemic. What has prohibited and permitted cardiovascular activity and hours before and during the pandemic, and what are the implications for quotidian health for future labour structures? Asking such questions, and reconsidering social determinants of health in light of lockdowns and remote living, may afford the social scientist pause in defining what exercise ‘is’, how it is done, and how it is provided by our relationship to the built environment.