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Call for abstracts, "The epistemological ethics of research in global
health"



International Conference of the Society for Medical Anthropology

September 24 - 27, 2009, Yale University
Deadline for Abstracts: 14th of April


Co-organizers:
Dominique Behague (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine)
Stacy Pigg (Simon Fraser University)

Conference website: http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/smaconference/

For over a century, attention has been given to the moral imperative
that researchers working in public heath have to produce knowledge
for the improvement of population health and wellbeing. However, the
institutional placement of evidence-production for public health has
become increasingly globalised – and diffused -- in the past two
decades. Scientific knowledge is no longer produced within medicine,
nor within the isolated realm of the academy, but is now routinely
commissioned and utilized by non-academic institutions and non-
clinicians, including public and private donors, national
governments, advocacy groups, and international non-governmental
organizations. These new institutional arrangements are exposing the
scientific research process to outside scrutiny by health workers,
consumer and citizen’s rights organizations, and the general public,
a process that has also supported the development of intricate
mechanisms for holding researchers and users of research, including
policy-makers, accountable to an increasingly codified, and yet wide-
ranging, moral code. This code stipulates, amongst other practices,
that researchers have an obligation to engage with policy, to conduct
research in a way that is useful and accessible to clinicians and
policy-makers, and to actively “get their research into policy.”
Policy-makers, in turn, are under increasing pressure to take
science, rather than political ideology, into account when making key
decisions. The more researchers engage with policy domains, the more
disciplinary and methodological diversity appear to be growing in
public health, a process that, at the same time, is fuelling
contentious and divisive debates on what is considered “useful,”
“beneficial,” “scientific” and “policy-relevant” evidence. In these
debates, greater attention is being given to the implications of the
way standard models of scientific research endorse an overly-narrow
definition of evidence, one that is inappropriately “de-politicizing”
public health action. With the growth of interest in so-called
“action” or “participatory” research, promoted by advocacy groups and
some donors, some researchers are moving away from experimental
quantitative investigations concerned with causality, to a form of
qualitative narrative-based research that can compellingly motivate
policy-makers to invest in a particular health issue and to engage
explicitly with the politics of health (e.g. human rights, equity,
poverty reduction, and empowerment). This panel aims to explore the
way these changing mechanisms of accountability, and the disciplinary
diversity that has ensued, are having significant epistemological
impacts on the ethics of the way researchers, activists and
politicians conceptualize core concepts in public health and the
social sciences, including most notably, “population-health,”
“society,” and “social change.”

Send abstracts of 200 words to [log in to unmask] by 13th
of April.

Selected panelist will be notified if they have been selected on the
14th of April. Please note that participants must register on the
conference website by the 15th of April.


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