***Apologies for cross posting***
Please join us for the last of our London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Medical Anthropology seminars this academic year
on Monday 20. May from 4-5pm in the Jenny Roberts room, LSHTM, Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9SH.
Dr. Dörte Bemme: Making knowledge "actionable": Horizoning techniques in Global Mental Health.
Abstract:
This presentation attends to the knowledge practices in Global Mental Health that render mental health knowledge "actionable." While much recent anthropological work on evidence, health metrics, and quantification has focused on the making of truth claims and universals - the hardening of facts, indicators, and epistemic objects - I shift our focus in the opposite direction: to the ways in which mental health knowledge is at times deliberately "softenend" and operationalized through open-ended horizoning techniques (while retaining measurability within the evidence-based-paradigm).
Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited fieldwork among GMH actors in North America, Europe, and South Africa, I show how interventionists often deliberately create conceptual indeterminacy to render mental health "actionable" across difference and scale. Three such horizoning practices will illustrate this point: the use of aggregate knowledge objects (scale, care, gap & contact coverage), the use of iterative evaluation designs in complex interventions (Theory of Change), and the evidentiary practices of ever-changing "multi-stakeholder" collectives that align their messages with different "platforms." The evidence emerging from Global Mental Health, I suggest, pivots as much around the question of `'truth" as it does around the desire and design for "action." Actionable knowledge, however, straddles often conflicting impulses; it is less oriented towards uncovering of an ontological truth, but towards a functional understanding of truth striving to make interventions "work."
Dörte Bemme is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Department for Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD from McGill University (Department for Social Studies of Medicine) and her M.A. from Humboldt University (Anthropology/Literature). Her dissertation is based on a multi-sited ethnography of the field of Global Mental Health investigating how its diverse actors reconcile the demand for globally comparable data with the need for locally meaningful interventions. Her fieldwork traversed GMH institutions and projects in Europe, South Africa, at WHO and World Bank. Interested in the production of 'global knowledge,' she attends to the changing configurations of the human, of care, and the epistemic contours of globality and scale itself. She is currently the managing editor of the journal for Transcultural Psychiatry.
This lecture is funded by the LSHTM Anthropology and Sociology Hub<https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/anthropology-sociology-hub>
UPCOMING SEMINARS:
Tuesday 8th October - Richard Milne (University of Cambridge)
Tuesday 12th November - Salla Sariola (University of Oxford)
Tuesday 10th December - Ann Kelly (King's College London)
For more information please contact one of the organisers:
Annelieke Driessen ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)
Fred Martineau ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)
Melissa Parker ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)
Annelieke Driessen
Research Fellow (Medical Anthropology)
http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/formsofcare/
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
15-17 Tavistock Place, room 110, London, WC1H 9SH
Tel: 020 7958 8295 ext. 8295
Click here<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459740.2019.1589464> to read my recent article 'Dementia Matters: User-Building Interactions Shaping Institutional Life in the Netherlands'
For more information about the Forms of Care project: http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/formsofcare/
New stories in the Thinking With Dementia Series: http://somatosphere.net/thinking-with-dementia
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