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Paper Short Abstract:

Employing ‘medical border making’ as an analytical term, this paper aims to show how borders permeate the social and cultural lives of the health institutions and shape them as inclusion/exclusion apparatuses.

Paper Abstract:

In Germany, migrants’ healthcare needs and perspectives have received limited attention, so that an institutional absence of migration in the German healthcare system is noticeable. This lack of epistemological and political attention to migrants’ health is to reflect in the design and development of healthcare ecosystem in Germany. Given the risks of encoding existing hierarchies, biases, assumptions and unchecked values into the research, design and development of health institutions, it is crucial to unpack how healthcare and access to it has been institutionalized. Healthcare systems are seen as social, cultural, economic and political bordering mechanisms that centralize (undesired) bodies in their discourses, and this makes it essential to understand not only the institutional logics behind the design of these systems, but also how ethnographic and critical engagement with borders, bodies and health can account for more reflexive, interdisciplinary and careful practices. Drawing on empirical research about the primary care of migrants in Göttingen, this paper proposes the term ‘medical border making’ to refer to the processes in which healthcare system as an institution, alongside other institutions and in contribution with them, represents and (re)produces the national, social and cultural borders to establish and institutionalize a certain interpretation of ‘difference’. Employing this as an analytical term, this paper aims to show how borders permeate the social and cultural lives of the health institutions and shape them as inclusion/exclusion apparatuses.