AAC – “Medical anthropology in collaborations” par la Medical Anthropology Switzerland & la Société suisse d’Ethnologie (SSE)

Annual Meeting of the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA), SEG Jahrestagung, Colloque annuel de la SSE – “Towards an anthropology for troubled times?”

Lucerne, June 6-8, 2024

PANEL F : Medical anthropology in collaborations: practices and politics of knowledge production across disciplinary and academic boundaries [Medical Anthropology Switzerland (MAS)]

>> Calls for communication has been extended until March 5th. To participate, please contact the panel organizers:

Convener(s)/Organizer(s)
Nolwenn Bühler (Unisanté University Center of General Medicine and Public Health), nolwenn.buhler@unil.ch
Nils Graber (IUFRS, UNIL), nils.graber@unil.ch
Julia Rehsmann (BFH, Bern), julia.rehsmann@bfh.ch

Description
Calls for interdisciplinarity and science-society engagements are increasingly made to address the complexity of polycrisis (Henig and Knight 2023), related to global challenges such as the covid-19 pandemic, the economic crisis, wars, or climate change. In the context of health and biomedicine, these “demands of the day” (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013) seem particularly pressing. With the rise of ‘experimental collaborative ethnographies’ to address an increasingly complex and uncertain world (Fortun et al. 2021), medical anthropologists have engaged with other disciplines, as well as various fieldwork actors and communities, and have taught and researched across disciplinary and professional boundaries. Yet interdisciplinarity and the public engagement of anthropology in practice carries potential as well as challenges and raises many methodological, epistemic, institutional, ethical, and political questions. We would like to address four questions in particular. First, how does the embarkment of anthropologists in different forms of ‘co-laborative work’ (Bieler et al. 2021) shape the production of anthropological knowledge and the kind of critical stances they can make? Second, if each discipline comes with its world and enact a specific kind of reality (Mol and Hardon 2020), what kind of work is required to make them meet and to which extent is it possible and desirable to develop interor trans- disciplinary research practices? Third, when medical anthropology tackles global health phenomena, how are collaborative practices in/from the Global South (Gamlin et al. 2020; Gamlin et al. 2021) negotiated and reconfigured? Four, what are the methodological and ethical implications of these engagements with different professional norms and epistemologies in and beyond the academia (Gibbon and Lamoreaux 2021)? In order to reflect on these questions, we invite colleagues involved in different forms of collaborations in health and biomedical settings to re-think medical anthropology and its publics (Fassin 2015; Fassin 2013). The panel will be organized in two parts: the first session will consist of a ‘traditional’ panel format with akeynote and paper presentations, followed by a roundtable discussion in the second session. We invite colleagues to submit an abstract for either a paper presentation or the roundtable.

Keynote by Sahra Gibbon, Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University College London (tbc). Sahra Gibbon’s work examines the interface between science, society and biomedicine, with longstanding experience of leading cross disciplinary research projects and developing collaborations with colleagues in Brazil and other regions in Latin America. She is deeply committed to crossdisciplinary dialogue, exchange and engagement in, and beyond the university, concerning health, environments and biosocial approaches.

References
Bieler, Patrick, Milena D. Bister, Janine Hauer, Marona Klausner, Jörg Niewöhner, Chrisone Schmid, and Sebasoan von Peter. 2021. “Distribuong Reflexivity through Co-Laboraove Ethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 50 (1). SAGE Publicaoons Inc: 77–98. doi:10.1177/0891241620968271.

Fassin, Didier. 2013. “WHY ETHNOGRAPHY MATTERS: On Anthropology and Its Publics.” Cultural Anthropology
28 (4): 621–646. doi:10.1111/cuan.12030.

Fassin, Didier. 2015. “The Public Aterlife of Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 42 (4): 592–609. doi:10.1111/amet.12158.

Fortun, Kim, Mike Fortun, Angela Hitomi Skye Crandall Okune, Tim Schütz, and Shan-Ya Su. 2021. “Civic Community Archiving with the Plauorm for Experimental Collaboraove Ethnography: Double Binds and Design Challenges.” In Culture and Compu9ng. Design Thinking and Cultural Compu9ng, edited by Mavhias Rauterberg, 36–55. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer Internaoonal Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77431-8_3.

Gamlin, Jennie, Sahra Gibbon, Paola M. Sesia, and Lina Berrío. 2020. Cri9cal Medical Anthropology: Perspec9ves in and from La9n America. Embodying Inequalioes: Perspecoves from Medical Anthropology. London: University College London.

Gamlin, Jennie, Jean Segata, Lina Berrio, Sahra Gibbon, and Francisco Ortega. 2021. “Centring a Criocal Medical Anthropology of COVID-19 in Global Health Discourse.” BMJ Global Health 6 (6). BMJ Specialist Journals: e006132. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006132.

Henig, David, and Daniel M. Knight. 2023. “Polycrisis: Prompts for an Emerging Worldview.” Anthropology Today 39 (2): 3–6. doi:10.1111/1467-8322.12793.

Mol, Annemarie, and Anita Hardon. 2020. “What COVID-19 May Teach Us about Interdisciplinarity.” BMJ Global Health 5 (12): e004375. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004375.

Rabinow, Paul, and Anthony Stavrianakis. 2013. Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry. University of Chicago Press.