Short Abstract:

In recent years, medical knowledge has undergone critique, contestation, and resistance in various social, structural, and institutional contexts. This panel seeks to provide a fresh insight into how changing power relations around health and the body are reflected in contested knowledge hegemonies.

Long Abstract:

This panel aims to explore and discuss how medical hegemonies are renegotiated and pushed to change in a world that is rapidly changing. Medical hegemonies rely on particular knowledge systems that legitimize them; ones that are being constantly subverted. One such domain among many is the digital where, globally, new media help its prod-users seek information on their own, hence undermining existing knowledge hegemonies.

With engaged and applied anthropological approaches in mind, our panel aims to bring together researchers that also engage in imagining not just the post-pandemic healthcare, that is on the minds of many nowadays, but the future of healthcare in general. The panel will be followed by a joined roundtable with the Heal02 panel, aiming to discuss, among other topics, possible futures of various health practices and politics, identifying what changes will need to occur in public care systems in order to accommodate changing societal needs.

The third part of our panel will take form of a roundtable discussion amongst panel participants and the audience around following questions:

- What's the role of information and communication technologies in the negotiation of medical hegemonies?

- How are the healthcare systems changing regarding voices of contestation?

- To address this year's SIEF's main theme, which is "Breaking the rules? Power, participation, transgression", we ask - how has the pandemic change power relations between health authorities and the rest of the society/patients/political elites?