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- Convenors:
-
Gregory Hollin
(University of Sheffield)
Ros Williams (University of Sheffield)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 20 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel foreground grounds matters of 'complicity' in medical anthropological research. Complicity here might take the form of the (perhaps unwitting, potentially unavoidable) reproductions of problematic exclusions, inequalities, or claims that might emerge out of research practice.
Long Abstract:
In what ways might medical anthropologists engage in forms of 'complicity'? The term has anchored a critique of researcher-stakeholder 'rapport'; for Marcus, ethnography might be better understood as 'mutual complicity in one another's projects, which entails…complex feelings around similarly identified purposes that both converge and diverge'. Building on this, we use complicity as an explorative heuristic for thinking through the methodological politics of contemporary medical anthropological research. Complicity here might take the form of (perhaps unwitting, potentially unavoidable) reproductions of problematic exclusions/inequalities/claims.
For example, in the context of Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or, CTE, cumulative damage caused by head trauma), most research is done with sportsmen - predominantly because of the ease of studying this sample. This is as true for ethnographers as epidemiologists, for in the UK it is challenging to secure access to relevant constituencies beyond predominantly male, white sports teams. Does this constitute complicity in, e.g., the erasure of domestic abuse victims within this research domain? Another example of complicity: this time at the intersection of race/biomedicine, where Black and Minority Ethnicity (BME) activists employ biologically essentialist tropes of race to encourage BME participation in biomedical projects. Participant observers may share sympathies with activists' political projects, whilst feeling uneasy about claims of race's essential nature. Does silence in the face of these claims amount to complicity in their propagation?
This panel discusses these matters and features presentations from authors contributing to a forthcoming edited collection on the topic.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 20 January, 2022, -Hannah Cowan (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) Hana Riazuddin (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation we share three preliminary tactics for disrupting the hegemonic production of medical knowledge through working with young people. These tactics take into account, and even find productive, our own complicities and limitations of being early-career researchers.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation we reflect on our ongoing work that attempts to redistribute the agenda-setting powers of researchers, research funders, and the complex of private and public partnerships in the biomedical sciences. Despite calls for diversification, the current landscape is dominated by a traditional medical habitus that prioritises discovery science. This has moral and political consequences. Simultaneously, we have seen a slow rise in top-down infrastructures of public participation in medical science. While we are critical of the resulting machinery of participation, we believe in its premise that knowledge and expertise are everywhere. In our research project – called Utopia Now! – we have been seeking to involve young people in deciding the future of biomedical research. However, this project is itself premised on a number of our own complicities with the power held by universities and research infrastructures. Here we explore three preliminary tactics through which we attempt to make these complicities politically productive, taking into account the limitations of working as early career researchers. We find that our mediation between researchers, young people, and policy makers is not only integral for re-politicising medical research, but also changes our understanding of knowledge production as a process of reordering, sorting, and sharing.
Anna Ozhiganova (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Paper short abstract:
Illegal medical practices are controversial: they can combine both progressive and outdated approaches, contribute to the humanization of care and lead to tragic incidents. An anthropologist working in this field has to make a contradictory combination of interested study and militant research.
Paper long abstract:
Post-Soviet Russian healthcare is characterized by a high level of institutional distrust, bureaucratic pressure of the State, and the vulnerability of doctors who do not have sufficient professional autonomy. In this situation, positive changes in healthcare in general and maternity care in particular often come from informal practices and relationships. As a medical anthropologist, I find myself in an ambiguous position as I need to maintain trust relations with different actors: obstetricians-gynecologists and hospital chiefs, professional midwives and homebirth midwives, doulas, and childbearing women. All interlocutors appeal to various authoritative sources and have their versions of knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth, which contradict each other. The situation is complicated by different informal practices, which may include childbirth with a doula, hiring homebirth midwives to work at the hospital, and even organizing a space for natural childbirth, which are often associated with violations of bureaucratic rules and protocols. Illegal medical practices (such as homebirth) are also very controversial: they can combine both progressive and outdated approaches, contribute to the humanization of care and lead to tragic incidents. I face many ethical challenges doing research in this contradictory field: I get potentially dangerous information and could be considered as an accomplice; I cannot publish the full information, and complete anonymization of data impoverishes the content. The inability to fully accept the position of one of the parties leads to the fact that I have to make a contradictory combination of interested study and militant research.
Christine Sargent (University of Colorado Denver)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the complicities of kinship and complexities of participation that shape ethnographic research. To do so, I reflect on the choices and constraints that informed my research focus on parents raising children with Down syndrome in urban Jordan.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the complicities of kinship and complexities of participation that shape ethnographic research. To do so, I reflect on the choices and constraints that informed my decision to focus on parents raising children with Down syndrome in urban Jordan. While I spent considerable time learning from children and adults with Down syndrome during my fieldwork, they figure into my writing primarily through the filtered lenses of parents and the ethnographer herself, rather than as active ethnographic interlocutors. My methodologies reproduced power asymmetries that are explicitly problematized by critical disability studies scholars and disability anthropologists, who have cogently argued that a focus on parents and caregivers too often effaces intellectually and developmentally disabled persons as agents and subjects. Yet beyond the concerns of institutional review boards (which themselves merit critical consideration), we are also accountable to our interlocutors’ relational perceptions of risk, harm, and appropriateness. While there are many promising and successful interventions that qualitative researchers can employ to include intellectually and developmentally disabled persons in research, their applications remain context and even individually specific. In grappling with the problem(s) of complicity, I consider both the parental practices of protection and surveillance that I encountered, as well as the affordances and constraints of my own positionality. I critically reassess some of my original methodological assumptions and their consequences while also asking whether some forms of failure – or uncomfortable complicity, to say the least – may be embedded in ethnographic methods.