******************************************************
* http://www.anthropologymatters.com *
* A postgraduate project comprising online journal, *
* online discussions, teaching and research resources *
* and international contacts directory. *
 ******************************************************

Diaspora and Disease

A conference to be held at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, London.

March 31st & April 1st 2005.

Call for Papers


In September 2003, the Department of Anthropology at
SOAS launched a new MA in Migration and Diaspora
Studies. The department already has a well established
MA in Medical Anthropology. The department intends to
host, in coordination with Edinburgh University, a
conference which will highlight, and explore, issues
relating to the transnational circuits of people and
associated medical discourses.

The aim of this conference is to bring about
discussion between those conducting research in
Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Public Health
and Medicine. The movement of people has long been
associated with the spread of disease and infections.
In light of this, we are concerned with the role of
medical knowledge and practices in relation to
Diaspora communities, and how these discourses have
contributed to the perception of diaspora populations
by host society, and helped shape wider questions of
belonging and citizenship. We aim to look at these
questions in their historical context, both in their
continuities and discontinuities, emphasising the
importance of this to an understanding of current
practices. Circuits of migration, and connected
medical practices are taking new forms, where, on the
one hand migrants are still associated with disease
and pollution, but migrants are also increasingly
staffing the infrastructure of western public health
services. At the same time, the west can no longer lay
claim to ‘superior’ biomedical provision. These shifts
signal new directions in the relationship between
medical discourse and diasporic ‘others’, giving rise
to a contradictory language of migrants being seen as
both a threat, and a solution to the ‘health of the
nation’.

Themes to be developed could include the following:

1. Plague, contamination and international migration

Historically, international migration has been
associated with the transport of disease. Regardless
of the evidence, metaphors of plague, and infection
have circulated and been used to marginalise and keep
out diaspora communities in host countries in an
effort to ‘exclude filth’. Migrants have been referred
to in terms such as the ‘Asiatic menace’ indicating a
virus-like threat to local populations. What impact do
the traces of these images have on current host
nation’s perceptions of diaspora communities? What
impact does this have on the diasporic communities’
self-perceptions, if any? Does this also impact on
conceptions of belonging, or feed into continuing
dialogues of displacement?

2. Homeland and healthcare

How has the globalisation of health care services
‘infected’ imaginings of home? Where the west was once
a place that many people travelled to, to receive
‘reliable’ health care, under the impact of
globalisation significant changes have begun to
emerge. With the increasing availability of high
standard health care in many parts of the non-western
world, many diaspora communities are going ‘home’ for
treatment. This has turned several stereotypes upside
down. For example, India, once ‘imagined’ as the site
of holistic health related practices, where mind and
body merge, is now also a sophisticated centre of
cheap and efficient biomedical treatment. How has this
affected the relationship between NRIs and their
homeland?

3. Infection and the source of disease.

Using tuberculosis as an example, outbreaks of this
disease in the ‘west’ have by some public health
discourses been represented as a consequence of
repeated visits of diaspora to their homeland. Such an
articulation has become possible with the advance of
medical science. For example, recent advances in
genetic fingerprinting techniques tracing the
causative organisms through individual bodies, have
been able to ‘locate’ the source of infection.
Re-exposed to tuberculosis in their homeland, they
consequently become more at risk of developing the
disease and bringing it back with them. How have
recent advances in biomedical science fed into, and
challenged, fears of this kind? In what ways have
emergent scientific ‘truths’ been appropriated for
political ends in host nations?

4. Movement of medical staff

Once trained in hygienic stations of Empire, and then
sent ‘home’ to administer public health, now health
workers who are trained in the homeland work elsewhere
in growing numbers. In the current economic and
political climate, health personnel trained in the
‘third world’ fill the gaps in increasingly fragile
public health infrastructures in the ‘west/north’.
Caught in webs of exploitation but also frequently
better remuneration, how has this specialised movement
of medical labour impacted on the formation of
diaspora? How are these movements of health workers
brokered and managed?

5. Assimilation and accessing health resources

In medical discourse, one particular concern with
diaspora has been articulated around lack of access
to, and underutilisation of, medical services in host
nations. What are considered to be the ‘barriers’
(linguistic, cultural, structural etc.) to these
resources have frequently framed research agendas,
within resource distribution focused on ‘ethnic
minorities’. How are discourses of assimilation into
host nation society linked to these concerns around
accessing health services? How does the relationship
between a biomedical humanism and a tolerance to
difference play out in these fields of contemporary
knowledge / practice?

It is intended that a selection of papers will form
the basis of a special edition of a journal focused on
diaspora studies, and an edited volume.


Expressions of interests and abstracts (Max 250 words)
should be sent to Dr Raman ([log in to unmask]) by
September 30th, 2004.




Organisers

Dr Parvathi Raman (SOAS)
Dr Christopher Davis (SOAS)
Dr Ian Harper (Edinburgh)



        
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

*************************************************************
* Anthropology-Matters Mailing List *
* To join this list or to look at the archived previous *
* messages visit: *
* http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML *
* If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all *
* those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: *
* [log in to unmask] *
 *************************************************************