17 September 2025 | 17:00-18:00 | 4-0-5

Dominik Mattes, Janina Kehr, Julia Koroknai, Friederike Rosenbaum, Helmar Kurz, Claudia Lang, Caroline Meier zu Biesen, Ehler Voss. With Nils Güttler, from intercom Verlag.

Book description:

Health and healthcare provision are an utterly complicated affair. In current times of proliferating socioeconomic inequalities, anthropogenic climate change, and environmental degradation, people across the globe face violent political conflict and war, while they struggle for justice and equity. Critical medical anthropologists have shown how even the most intimate aspects of illness and health are to be understood in the light of such larger political-economic forces, which shape human existence and experience. The authors of this volume attend to the multiple ways in which health is envisioned, theorized, and actually ‘done’ despite much adversity. In this context, radicality refers to unconventional forms of designing or doing healthcare and therapeutic processes that share a transformative ethos; but it is not restricted to novelty, and also implies stubborn forms of insistence on and experimentation with healthcare otherwise. The contributions of this collection derive from a conference entitled ‘Radical Health. Doing Medicine, Health Care, and Anthropology of the Good’ that took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in June 2021. Reflecting the conference set-up, the volume assembles a diverse mix of scholars, healthcare practitioners, activists, and artists who are concerned with the relations between health, power, and inequality, but also look at diverse aspirations for collective care, solidarity, friendship, and more just futures. Their contributions include novel formats like conversations, drawing-based ethnography, or auto-ethnographic writing that test the boundaries of classical academic articles and help ‘real utopias’ come into being. The volume appears online and in print in the experimental"cache" publication series by intercom Verlag, Zurich.

https://cache.ch/radicalhealth

Author bio (editors):

Dominik Mattes is Guest Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin with a long-standing interest in critical medical anthropology and global health, religious diversity, migration and belonging, and the anthropology of affect and emotion.

Janina Kehr is a Professor of Medical Anthropology and Global Health at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals and public health institutions in France, Germany and Spain. Her research interests revolve around the politics, colonial hauntings, moral economies and environmental side-effects of biomedicine and public health, particularly regarding global infectious diseases, pharmaceuticals and hospitals.

Julia Koroknai is an MA student in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, where she focuses on topics related to medical anthropology and public health. She contributed to the publication under the guidance of Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Janina Kehr, initially as a student assistant and subsequently as an editor.

Friederike Rosenbaum holds an M.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin, specializing in political anthropology, emotions and affects, and diversity studies. She contributed to the publication as part of her work as a student assistant for Prof. Dr. Dominik Mattes and later became an editor.

Helmar Kurz is a lecturer and researcher in Medical Anthropology and Transcultural Psychiatry with a nursing background. At the University of Münster, he focuses on religious, spiritual, and sensory aspects of care, healing, and well-being. His PhD (2022) emerged from the DFG-funded program Diversification of Mental Health: Therapeutic Spaces of Brazilian Spiritism (2015–2018).

Claudia Lang is Associate Professor of Anthropology of Health at Maastricht University. Her research explores mental health, digitization, ecological distress, global and planetary health, and traditional medicine, mainly in South Asia. She is the author of Depression in Kerala (Routledge, 2018) and co-author of Global Health for All (Rutgers, 2022) and The Movement for Global Mental Health (AUP, 2021).

Caroline Meier zu Biesen is Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Global Health at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research explores care and ecological challenges in epidemics (HIV/AIDS, malaria, NCDs) and gendered diseases such as endometriosis, with a growing focus on human–environment relations, environmental crises, and their health effects. She aims to develop inclusive, context-responsive, and ecologically attuned health interventions on a planetary scale.

Ehler Voss is an anthropologist working at the intersections of medical, media, political, and religious anthropology. He studies transatlantic entanglements of orthodox and heterodox knowledge cultures, from occultism and media history to their links with medical and scientific innovation. He is Managing Director of Worlds of Contradiction (WOC), Private Lecturer at the University of Bremen, chair of AGEM, editor-in-chief of Curare, and co-founder of boasblogs.

17 September 2025 | 17:00-18:00 | 4-0-4

Mirko Pasquini (moderated by Lenore Manderson)

Book description:

Who is to be attended first? And how should such a decision be made? The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room ethnographically explores the everyday life of one of the thickest places in contemporary societies: the ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration laws, hospital overcrowding, and life and death, intersect daily. The book describes the effect of those intersections for clinicians and their patients, as well as for policy makers and the health-care system more generally.

Mirko Pasquini shows that there is more than medical urgency at stake in the ER, where mistrust of medical authority is fueled and violence often sparks. He analyzes the making of urgency, that is triage, not as a neutral medical way of sorting, but as a practice that actively creates difference through economies of attention. The Negotiation of Urgency illustrates both the limits of triage, and how those limits can spark improvisation and creative reinvention.

Author bio:

Mirko Pasquini is Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His latest project, "Mistrust in practice: an ethnography of suspicion in general medical practice in the aftermath of COVID-19," is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Mirko is also a core editor of "The Lancet Global Social Medicine Case Series." His new book “The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room”, 2025, is out with Rutgers University Press. To promote the application of critical social science concepts within medicine, Mirko is engaged in health workers’ training in “Structural Competency” in Sweden, Denmark and Italy. He is also part of the Applied Health Club of the Applied Anthropology Network (AAN).

18 September 2025 | 17:00-18:00 | 4-0-5

Matthew Wolf-Meyer (moderated by Roberta Raffaeta)

Book description:

American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness. 

Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg’s ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet and parenting advice books, Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease.

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion—what goes into the body and what comes out of it—create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it—personally, politically, and theoretically—opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

Author bio:

Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S. Wolf-Meyer marries ethnographic research with patients, their families, and patient support networks, participant-observation of scientists, clinicians, and health care workers, and archival analysis of scientific monographs and public policies to show how thorny, contemporary problems have developed out of longstanding ideas about health and disease, disability and normalcy, and nature and civilization.

18 September 2025 | 17:00-18:00 | 4-0-3

Bernhard Hadolt, Hansjörg Dilger, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Rikke Sand Andersen

Book series description: 

The book series “Transformations in Medical Anthropology” aims to break new ground in the field of medical anthropology. In particular, the book series invites proposals that address – and aim to advance – transformations in medical anthropology in thematic, conceptual and representational terms.

Author bio:

Hansjörg Dilger is a socio-cultural anthropologist and head of the Research Area Medical Anthropology | Global Health at Freie Universität Berlin.

Bernhard Hadolt is a social anthropologist with a particular interest in medical anthropology, especially the anthropology of biomedicine, based at the University of vienna

Natashe Lemos Dekker is a cultural and medical anthropologist based at the University of Amsterdam. 

Rikke Sand Andersen is a medical anthropologist and former editor-in-chief of the medical anthropology journal Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund.