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- Convenors:
-
Magdalena Góralska
(University of Warsaw)
Mariusz Sapieha (University of Amsterdam)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Health and Medicine
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
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.
We invite papers that investigate such changes in knowledge-power relations in regard to health and the body. In particular, we welcome papers that focus on narratives, practices and affects of critique, contestation, and resistance, both for and against biomedical hegemonies and public health policies. This may include topics such as broadly understood health activism, from various patient rights to free-of-charge healthcare policies, biomedical skepticism or TCAM interests, self-care practices, both digitalized and not, among others. We strongly encourage papers exploring the more tacit acts of agency, drawing on medical anthropology's suitability in inquiring into subtleties of changing power relations.
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.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Kia Andell (University of Turku)
Paper short abstract:
Boundary-work has often been analyzed as a practice by which science seeks to demarcate itself from other forms of knowledge. This paper approaches it from people’s everyday lives and bodily experiences, especially uncanny experiences, that have been pathologized in modern medical sciences.
Paper long abstract:
In modern medical sciences uncanny experiences, like visions, voices, telepathy, or encounters with the dead loved ones, have been treated as unreal, hallucinations, and pathologies of an individual mind or brain. To the subjects themselves, however, they may be very real and meaningful bodily sensations that force the subject to question common medical accounts about the human mind/body and the underlying natural-scientific worldview. The paper analyses ‘boundary-work’ (Gieryn 1999) between scientific and experiential forms of knowledge in context of ‘public engagement with science’ by drawing on written first-hand narratives of uncanny experiences that were spontaneously sent by Finnish people to the research project Mind and the Other (Academy of Finland 2013–2016). While boundary-work has often been analyzed as a practice by which science seeks to demarcate itself from other forms of knowledge, this paper approaches it from the “other side”, from people’s everyday lives, bodily experiences and “lay epistemologies”. It shows how, on one hand, scientific and experiential knowledge may be perceived as incommensurable by the experiencers. Especially medical science is imagined as a powerful discursive-material norm that restricts the possibility of human experience and ‘imposes un-negotiated meanings’ (Wynne 2006) and pathological identities on the subjects. On the other hand, fields like neuroscience are expected to hold potential to change the pathological labels and thus normalize and legitimate uncanny experiences in society. Moreover, science becomes narrated as a progressive and flexible system of knowledge that is open for people’s personal experiences, their own knowledge and expertise.
Reda Šatūnienė (Lithuanian University of Health Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
Thesis will discuss contemporary non-conventional healing (self-care) practices as an individual human journey within frames of cultural identity, and will explore it‘s cultural character as manifestation of freedom, individuality and independence.
Paper long abstract:
After the Lithuania‘s retrievement of Independence (1990), a flow of information, followed by different kinds of non-conventional healing methods/practices, emerged. After years of censorship, and information ‚hunger‘, quasi all novelties were of high interest, what also included formerly ‘forbidden knowledge’, like for ex., spiritual, esoteric, literature, altogether with non-conventional (self)healing practices, which presumably embodied societal needs of that era: need of re-creation, re-definition of the new ‚self‘ after the communist system collapse (Ross, 2012: 135-136).
Nowadays, a cultural identity of contemporary non-conventional healing practices in Lithuania carries ambivalent features. Usually, it is taken as possessing ‘soft, natural, spiritual’ nature, but in current pandemic times, in some cases, it started being even demonized. Latter processes catalyzes a need for re-definition of ‘non-conventional healing’ phenomenon once again. Empirical data (qualitative methods, autoetnography; 2016-2019) let us presume that non-conventional healing supporters usually grants authority (and power) to biomedicine. But sort of ‚resistance‘ (or, criticism) was witnessed towards some aspects of official medical system, actual individual needs, etc. So, cultural identity seem to be ambiguous.
Thesis will overview, and contextualize cultural identity of non-conventional healing sphere in Lithuania since mid 90‘s up to date within perspective of humanities.
Katarzyna Slaby (Jagiellonian University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on my current fieldwork in Prostate and Breast Cancer Support Groups and taking into account their biomedical underpinning I will describe the existent “negotiations” or “alliances” with biomedicine by looking closely into the question of power, gender and dominant model of survivorship.
Paper long abstract:
Proposed presentation is a part of the comparative study in two cancer support groups: Breast cancer support group (BCSG) and Prostate cancer support group (PCSG) in mid-sized town in Poland. Since February 2019 I’ve been investigating cancer remission narrative(s) (Frank 1995) on personal and collective level (“community narratives” Rappaport 1995), including extent to which members are embracing model(s) of survivorship supported by biomedicine, currently also when confronted with coronavirus pandemic. It’s beyond question, that biomedicine, as an institution of social control produces its own sort of knowledge and values, implemented during the course of illness and beyond, including model of recovery. On the other hand, those groups as literally embodying the illness experience, constitute some sort of the biosociality themselves, codifying own norms of survivorship (Burke 2005). My ongoing study shows that while both studied cancer groups remain somehow entangled with institutionalized health services (e.g. by renting the space within hospital facility and, above all, by providing voluntary work with and within biomedical realm) they have managed to espouse different agendas concerning model of activism and “dealing with” biomedicine. This peculiarity entails a wide range of knowledges and practices being exchanged and negotiated, empowered or downgraded by medical “ally”, (which may even lead to the question whether biomedicine has its own “gender”). Through analysis of interviews and observations I will discuss the "alliances" and “negotiations” with biomedical surveillance and theirs possible outcomes, being especially attentive to the questions of power, gender and dominant model of survivorship in those two groups.
Mayne Benedetto (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes an ethnographical investigation within autistic only groups on Facebook during 2020. I reflexively examine, using observant participation, how ABA constitutes a conversion therapy, its devastating effects, and the efforts of the autistic community to redefine healthcare.
Paper long abstract:
This paper proposes an ethnographical investigation within autistic only support groups on Facebook during 2020. This qualitative study examined digital content and online interactions about Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). Drawing on data from an initial empirical effort to implement this approach, I reflexively examine, using observant participation, how ABA constitutes a conversion therapy whose sole objective is making autistic people behave like their “normal” peers, its devastating effects, and the effort of the autistic community to redefine healthcare for those on the spectrum.