easa

The emerging field of global health has enabled a focus on health and health equity as a subject which transcends national boundaries. At the same time political, economic and ecological transformations world-wide are occurring through flows of people, ideas, technologies, goods, medicine, expertise, services, philanthropy and aid. What are the effects of these diverse flows on health systems, people’s well-being and their understanding and ability to sustain, restore or achieve good health? What kinds of relationships, ideas, moralities, ideologies, and rights discourse are mobilised in the interests of saving lives and achieving public health goods and goals? Are the principles of justice and equity realised in global health?

The conference seeks to explore the creative and dynamic tensions which arise in conceptual and methodological terms from work at the intersections of anthropology and global health. What do the constructivist, interpretive and critical perspectives of medical anthropology, alternative concepts of well-being and vernacular expressions of dis-ease bring to the field of global health? How are the positivisms of biomedicine and public health being shaped by global flows in the economy? What are anthropological responses to the growing health inequalities of free market ideologies, neo-liberal social marketing and the privatisation of care? In turn, how do the field realities of practising and improvising medicine and public health in resource-constrained settings alter our understandings of the moral economy of care and care-giving? Where and how do discourses of risk and population hide or reveal individual access and priority in care?

This exciting and topical conference, which is the first international medical anthropology conference to be held in the UK under the auspices of the EASA Medical Anthropology Network and the RAI Medical Anthropology Committee, seeks to interrogate the paradigms and practice of global health. We invite reflective contributions from anthropologists working at policy, programme or community levels to understand global health issues from a range of perspectives including varieties and processes of contagion around infectious diseases, chronicity and temporal rhythms associated with non-communicable diseases, reproductive commodification and entitlements in maternal and child health, the physiological and cosmological significance of human-animal interactions, chronic and life-style related ailments, occupational health-risks, physical and mental trauma associated with rape, domestic violence, war, conflicts and natural disasters.

Now read the accepted panels.