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- Convenors:
-
Kristofer Hansson
(Malmö University)
Rachel Irwin (Lund University)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Health and Medicine
- Location:
- Aula 4
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 April, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
The medical landscape is a constantly changing field, both in relation to new knowledge and innovative technology as well as a changing world. In this session we are interested in papers that present current cultural research exploring and reflecting upon these changes in the broadest sense.
Long Abstract:
The medical landscape is a constantly changing field, both in relation to new knowledge and innovative technology as well as a changing world. Some examples are new emerging diseases and changing welfare societies. In ethnological and folkloric research there is a long tradition of exploring and reflecting upon this kind of issues from a broad variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives. These include, but are note limited to: cultural beliefs around long-term illness, explanations of health and healing, the ways in which society's controlling mechanisms work across bodies, and how modern biomedicine and digitalization provides new cultural perspectives. In this session we are interested in papers that present ongoing research based on the medical field in the broadest sense. These may be empirically grounded papers, or more theoretical and methodological reflections. Participants will discuss questions such as: In what empirical fields are we working? What methodological or theoretical track changes shall we do to explore additional fields and expand our research? What role does ethnological and folkloristic research play in the emerging field of medical humanities? Central is also: How can we work with/within healthcare and how can we expand this work? How do we participate in interdisciplinary research? What are good examples of more integrative humanities? Through the session, we wish to make visible and strengthen the ethnological and folkloristic research in an international context dealing with health and medicine, and to create a stronger network of researchers in the transforming research field of medical humanities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 April, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper I ask how ethnology with a medical humanities perspective can use the term Anthropocene to better understand the emerging fact that we soon will stand without functional antibiotics.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropocene has become one of the most central concepts to understand and critically scrutinize the indelible traces humans have done on earth - traces that we now leave after us for all eternity. Natural sciences are today looking for markers that can highlight this change and one of the clearest examples are Plutonium-239 from the atomic bombs in the 1940s. Another example is the resistant bacteria's that have been generated since humans began to use antibiotics, also in the 1940s. But we can also see how it affects the medical landscape and how older medical discourses and practices about healthcare are changing. In this paper I ask how ethnology with a medical humanities perspective can use the term Anthropocene to better understand the emerging fact that we soon will stand without functional antibiotics. From a cultural analytic perspective I will present those narratives that we are using in Sweden today when discussing antibiotic. I will also look into how these narratives are used to create a form of historical writing about the coming future. The empirical material consists of official reports, news articles, TV reports and so on. The material also consists of written questions on a questionnaire and material from different online forums where people debate these questions. In this way I want to use medical humanities to study and highlight the "new narratives" that can influence us in a positive direction for the 21st Century.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I present a state of the art report with focus on the knowledge and sources of information about medicines and medicine procurement among children from different cultural and social backgrounds in Sweden.
Paper long abstract:
The increasing prevalence of falsified medicines in the multicultural society of Sweden has raised serious concerns as it poses direct harm to consumers from different age, social and cultural backgrounds and sadly enough, children are among the risk groups. Hence, investigating children's health knowledge from a cultural analytical perspective is of great importance. In this paper, I present a state of the art report with focus on the knowledge and sources of information about medicines and medicine procurement among children from different cultural and social backgrounds in Sweden. Having the social and political changes in mind, I look into the kind(s) of education provided to children about health and medicines in Sweden, and the possible marks that socio-cultural changes may have left behind on the creation and exchange of knowledge. As a part of this research, I will also look at the methods of information exchange and their influence on children's attitude and behaviour towards health and medicines. Investigating these areas can reveal different routes of knowledge production and if they have changed along the way, help to raise good research questions, and map the current position of knowledge.
Paper short abstract:
I will talk about the cooperation between anthropologists from University of Warsaw and doctors and students of Warsaw Medical University engaged in the research project on social aspects of Turner Syndrome - a genetic condition that affects girls and women involving absence of the X chromosome.
Paper long abstract:
I will talk about the cooperation between anthropologists from the Childhood Studies Interdisciplinary Research Team at the University of Warsaw and doctors and students of Warsaw Medical University engaged in the research project titled "Turner Syndrome. Socialization patterns and the management of the embodiment in chronic disease. An interdisciplinary approach", and I will reflect upon its benefits and limitations. Turner Syndrome (TS) is a condition that affects girls and women involving partial or complete absence of the X chromosome. On the one hand, it is a well recognized medical diagnosis, on the other - a multidimensional cultural fact that manifests itself in specific historical, social and geographical contexts. TS is characterized by short stature, ovarian failure, frequent cardiovascular complications and other medical problems. Through daily growth hormone injections and compulsory regular checkups, one's life story develops an extended connection with biomedicine.
In our project we tried to abandon the clear (and artificial) boundaries between medicine and anthropology, between illness and disease. This meant that doctors, patients (and their parents), and anthropologists served as elements of a wider network (obviously many more human and non-human actors create socio-medical situations) as they shared the same goal and needed each other. All were mediators: anthropologists - between patients and doctors, doctors - between patients and anthropologists, patients - between anthropologists and medical staff. In the TS project, the results of the encounter between medicine and humanities are among others social guidelines for doctors and people working with TS girls and women.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on patients' access to health services in the countryside of the Bolivian Andes. Health assistance is not only an important "service" doctors provide to patients but an "issue" that has to be negotiated on a municipal and community level.
Paper long abstract:
Whereas health politics are launched on a national level, everyday health assistance is fiercely contested and negotiated on a municipal and community level. Here do patients, community health representatives, health station staff (auxiliary nurses, nurses, and doctors), NGO workers, municipal government representatives, and traditional health experts try to put into practice decisions that were taken from the distance. The process of implementation varies from one to another locality in the Bolivian countryside. That means that health assistance is not a service a patient in the countryside can rely on.
In Aucapata municipality where I carried out fieldwork one health "station" and five health "posts" are meant to provide primary health care, but patients have to cope for instance with temporal and permanent closures, lack of health staff and infrastructure, and language barriers. Despite a national intercultural health initiative called "SAFCI" ('Intercultural Family Health Programme') which not only takes cultural health concepts of people seriously but tries to incorporate traditional medical experts, health assistance is not always guaranteed. It is therefore that people I spoke to opt for a combination of auto-curation, traditional health assistance by a practitioner, and health station.
Already back in 2006 Spanish anthropologists Gerardo Fernández Juárez and colleagues (2006) have dug deeply into the concept of interculturality in Latin American health politics in general, and Bolivia in particular, showing the difference between theory and practice. Inquiries into health-related issues are important because they can bring light into the constantly changing entanglements of patients, places, and politics.
Paper short abstract:
Once global health data has been collected, cleaned and analysed, it is disseminated through reports, websites and various data visualisation tools. This paper presents an ethnographic approach to studying the social, economic and political contexts of data visualization
Paper long abstract:
Once global health data has been collected, cleaned and analysed, it is disseminated through reports, websites and various data visualisation tools. Well-known examples include the Global Burden of Disease's data visualisations or the work of the Gapminder Foundation, whose tagline is "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based worldview." The production of data visualizations includes researchers, editors, graphic designers, and relies on the human- software interaction. As Vincanne Adams (2016) has noted, metrics work is a form of storytelling. Not only are these stories about the production of data, but they are also stories about a 'reality' that is purportedly told by the data. Once the disease burden has been counted and calculated, it must be interpreted and used - a process which presents ethical and aesthetical questions. The ordering of 'messy' data into graphs and figures promotes a certain truth about the state of global health. Choices are taken on what to visualise and what to leave out. Graphs and figures are disembodied from the socio-political context of data collection, and from the lived experience of individuals represented in the data points.
This paper examines ethnographic moments in the data handling process that offer insight into the social, economic and political contexts of data handling and display.