**Extended deadline** April 4th, 2016
Call for Papers: 115th AAA Annual Meeting 'Evidence, Accident, Discovery'
16th-20th Nov. 2016, Minneapolis
"Evidence or experience based? Biomedicine as localized practices"
Organizers: Mustafa Abdalla (PhD, Freie Universität Berlin), Judith
Schühle (PhD Candidate, Freie Universität Berlin)
Discussant: Prof. Claire Wendland, University of Wisconsin
Biomedicine has always been an inherently transnational practice,
especially in the ‘global South’ with professionals from different
localities moving to study, to teach or to practice in other countries.
However, it has also taken root in local contexts and developed as
historically grown localized practices in different regions worldwide.
Countering the “technological imperative” (Adams and Kaufman 2011) from
the ‘global North’, many physicians trained in and/or practicing in the
‘global South’ understand experience-based hands-on medicine as the core
of biomedicine. Mastery in this art of medicine rather than merely in the
science of medicine is viewed as one characteristic of local biomedical
practice that distinguishes doctors in the ‘global South’. Thus, the
global biomedical landscape today is characterized by both a highly
technologized evidence-based medical practice, where magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) and computerized axial tomography scans (CAT) become
standard investigative tools as well as a hands-on approach where
diagnoses are made with little technological intervention by relying on
conventional tools such as the stethoscope and are based on experience
(c.f. Livingston 2012, Street 2014). In this panel, we seek to focus on
local variations of practicing biomedicine: What characterizes good
medical practice in different biomedical contexts (e.g. in the ‘global
South’ and in the ‘global North’, in public and private healthcare
systems)? How do doctors arrive at a diagnosis in highly technologized
environments and in less technologized contexts? What ideas on care go
with one and the other? Which local variations exist of history-taking and
physical examination? What generational differences exist in practicing
medicine within one context? How is medical practice taught in evidence
and experienced based environments? What does evidence mean in different
contexts? How is evidence perceived by patients and professionals? How is
it communicated in different localized biomedical languages? Which factors
(e.g. availability of technology, litigation, patient-demand) contribute
to a favoring of evidence-based medicine? What do narratives on special
hands-on skills say about a positioning of doctors on a global biomedical
landscape? What happens to perceptions of best local practices when
doctors practice in other localities (e.g. after migrating or during
medical missions)? How do biomedical practices shape the relationship
between patients, physicians and also medical students in different
contexts? We invite papers that focus on local biomedical practices
worldwide, that examine how they are shaped by local conditions as well as
flows of global biomedical knowledge and technologies embedded in
historically grown power regimes and consider how agency is created by
narratives of best local practice.
Please email your abstract of no more than 250 words to Judith Schühle
([log in to unmask]) before April 4th 2016. Abstracts will then be
reviewed and emails of acceptance will be sent out on 7th April 2016.
Please note that if your abstract will be chosen, you have to register for
the AAA conference and submit your abstract online before 15th April 2016.
Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email the panel
convenors Judith Schühle ([log in to unmask]) and Mustafa Abdalla
([log in to unmask]).
Works cited:
Adams, Vincanne and Kaufman, Sharon R. (2011): Ethnography and the Making
of Modern Health. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 35(2): 313-320.
Livingston, Julie (2012): Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward
in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Durham: Duke University Press.
Street, Alice (2014): Biomedicine in an Unstable Place. Infrastructure and
Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital. London, Durham: Duke
University Press.
Best regards
Mustafa Abdalla and Judith Schühle
--
Judith Schühle M.A.
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin // research fellow
Doktorandin // PhD Candidate
Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie // Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology
Freie Universität Berlin
Landoltweg 9-11
14195 Berlin
[log in to unmask]
(030) 838 59284
http://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/ethnologie/personen/wiss_mitarb_u_koord_aus_drittmitteln/schuehle.html
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