Call for Poster - Making Medicine in Austere Times. Materialities, Moralities, and Policies of Care
We warmly invite abstract submissions for the poster session of the
international symposium “Materialities, Moralities and Policies of Care.
Making Medicine in Austere Times”, which will be held at the Institute
of Social Anthropology, Bern University, Switzerland, from June 11-13,
2019.
With this multidisciplinary symposium we interrogate the intricate ways
in which worldwide situations of austerity influence people's
experiences of illness and healing, clinical practices, as well as
triage/prioritization logics in public health policies and the
infrastructures of health care systems. The symposium will explore the
three following issues, at the intersection of ethnography, history and
policy analysis:
1. The contemporary strategies of patients, families and health
professionals dealing with scarcity and austerity: experiences and
embodiments
How do social actors or institutions cope with and experience the lack
of resources? How do contexts of scarcity prompt them to create or to
reflect on new forms of care? How to understand new forms of solidarity,
care and humanitarian interventions in austere times? Are they a
specific form of resistance to austerity, or a way of adapting to it and
its effects?
1. Health precarity and its contemporary shapes in the global health era: locations and circulations
Has the raise of austerity measures in Europe lead to convergences
between the Global North and South? How do austerity measures,
interventions and resistances circulate across the Global South and
North, in times where a global neoliberal economy imperative prevails?
In which ways can a look at circulations help to provincialize austerity
while acknowledging its global scope? Has the notion the same relevancy
and effects in the global North and the global South?
1. The various periodizations of crisis and austerity (or absence thereof): temporalities and meanings
What does austerity mean within various temporal contexts worldwide? How
is the notion relied to practices, ideologies, policies, situations,
periods of time or forms of crisis in the past? What are the differences
and similarities between structural adjustment policies of the 1980s in
the Global South and current austerity measures?
The symposium will include a dedicated poster session, primarily for
Ph.D. students and early-career researchers. Work-in-progress is
welcome! Interested participants are kindly invited to send a brief CV
of no more than one page and a short abstract (150 words) to Janina Kehr
(janina.kehr@anthro.unibe.ch<