Call for Papers for ‘Mobilising Methods in Medical Anthropology 2020’, a conference of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Medical Anthropology Committee in collaboration with London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that will take place 3-4 September 2020
at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London.
Panel Title: Embracing reductionism, the anthropological way
Convenors: Roberta Raffaetà, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Andrea Ravenda, University of Bologna
In the new millennium, biomedicine and its professionals are not the main actors shaping and reproducing processes of medicalization and biopower. They have increasingly become recipients – together with their patients – and mediators or executors of technology and policy innovations. Accordingly, the places where those innovations originate (as laboratories, institutions and startups) are becoming interesting sites of anthropological investigation. In such places, medical anthropologists encounter diverse professionals such as biologists, informaticians, data analysts, engineers, politicians, lawyers, managers and entrepreneurs. Interactions with them may take various forms that spans from defensiveness or exploitation to productive engagement toward the shared aim to produce new and meaningful knowledge. We argue that in order to achieve the latter, anthropologists should not restrain themselves by critiquing others of being ‘reductionist’ (biological, epistemological or methodological reductionism). This is a classical anthropological critique that is now gaining more currency with biomedicine being captured within technological determinism and big data. With this panel we would like to bring attention toward the fact that reductionism may mean different things and take various shapes. We, therefore, invite contributors to unpack what reductionism may mean in (para)medical settings and how we may interact with and contribute to different reductionisms by redefining them at the same time.
We invite interested contributors to submit a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words by May 12 through this link https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/med2020#9398
Link to the conference: https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/mobilising-methods-in-medical-anthropology-2020
thanks, Roberta and Andrea