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Posted Thu, 17 May 2018 19:46:22
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We are delighted to announce the next BSA South-Coast regional symposium:
Medical pluralism: fuzzy boundaries and ambivalent careers in the shadow of biomedicine, Guest Speakers Emilie Cloatre ( University of Kent) and Nicola Gale (University of Birmingham) Wednesday 27th June 12.45- 2.30pm Moot room Freeman Building, University of Sussex
Speaker 1: Legalities and the (re)making of traditional medicines.
Emilie Cloatre (University of Kent)
This paper explores what the making of the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘fake’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, in the context of traditional healing can teach us of the relationship between law and medicine. It argues that as law and biomedicine have grown to share common understandings of the nature of knowledge, and in turn shared views on how it can be proven or attributed, they have come to act as converging colonizing forces that displace and alter 'other' forms of knowing and ordering. In turn, even as regulatory systems set out to recognize some forms of traditional medicine, they often continue to operate on assumptions that disqualify knowledge, products, and actors that do not resemble their biomedical counterparts. An effect is to leave traditional healing systems potentially having to either operate outside the law, or adapt to it by transforming themselves beyond the point of recognition to fit better into the systems provided by law and biomedicine. The paper makes two main arguments. First, that some of the assumptions about medical knowledge-making that law has embedded are both potentially problematic and performative, reshaping the future of healing systems as they set out to regulate them and limiting further possibilities for alternative epistemologies. Second, that the role that law plays in those movements, and in the constitution of the real and the fake, the genuine and the pseudo, are not just incidental to broader market forces, but rather there is a particular strength to the relationship between law and biomedicine, as joint tools of power and governance, that both reifies and hides from view processes of assimilation in knowledge production. As legal systems look to ‘regulate better’ the complex fields of traditional medicine, they rest on the only tools that the law has developed to determine truth and fakeness in medicine: those of biomedicine itself.
Speaker 2: The ambivalent entrepreneur and the importance of ‘sustaining’ networks: careers in complementary and alternative medicine.
Nicola Gale (University of Birmingham)
In this paper, I will share findings from an ESRC-funded study on the careers of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners in the UK. CAM is defined sociologically by its marginal position in the health system in relation to biomedicine, yet around half of the UK population will consult a CAM therapist during their life making it a central sociological concern. My own interests are in work, employment and embodiment and I use these lenses to explore the experiences of practitioners of CAM – and particularly the challenges they face when trying to make a ‘career’ of CAM. I explore two main findings from the work: first, that graduates from CAM courses are ‘ambivalent’ about their role as small business owners and I unpick the reasons why it can be hard to make a living from CAM practice. Second, I explore the role of social support and networks in the lives of practitioners and why their marginalised social position necessitates active building of ‘sustaining’ social networks.
University of Brighton
BSA Medical Sociology Committee Programme co-lead
T: 01273 641143
E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
t: @shadrachM
Profile: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/staff/shadreck-mwale.aspx
My new book: Healthy Volunteers in Commercial Clinical Drug Trials: when human beings become guinea-pigs, Palgrave McMillan, 978-3-319-59213-8,https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319592138
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