16 September 2025 | 17:00-18:30 | C1 Lecture Hall Center - University of Vienna Campus

The Medical Anthropology Europe conference aims to cultivate inclusive spaces that encourage lively discussions as well as caring and careful engagements between participants on contemporary issues of health and well-being.

For the opening session, therefore, instead of a traditional keynote, we will be hosting a roundtable conversation featuring three outstanding scholars: César Abadía-Barrero, Michele Friedner, and Igor Grabovac. The discussion will be moderated by Janina Kehr, and will explore the transformative potential of medical anthropology in troubled times: how our theories travel, how our methods matter, and how our work can intervene ethically and politically.

The opening session will consist of two parts. First, each panellist will give a 10–15 minute introduction to their area of work. This will be followed by a joint discussion on the political and epistemological challenges of doing medical anthropology and its future aspirations.

Moderator: Janina Kehr - University of Vienna

Participants:

César Abadía-Barrero - University of Connecticut
Michele Friedner - University of Chicago
Igor Grabovac - Medical University of Vienna

17 September 2025 | 18:00-19:30 | HS 1

Over the past decade, medical anthropology has remained a vital site of critical reflection on health, illness, and care. From public health to global health, from climate change to pandemics, from migration to embodied inequalities, the field has participated in interdisciplinary conversations across the social sciences. Yet as technological, linguistic, institutional and political transformations accelerate, as young scholars we find ourselves questioning what’s ahead of us. Amidst the EASA community, a major forum for young scholars to embrace these questions over the past years has been through the MAE subnetwork, Medical Anthropology Young Scholars’ (MAYS) annual meetings.

This roundtable builds on several years of collective discussion within MAYS meetings. The trajectory started in Utrecht (2022), which sought to make sense of the syndemic. This crisis laid bare deep social fractures and highlighted the paradox that, despite anthropology’s proven ability to analyze such crises, its crucial insights often remain on the margins of social action. This was followed by Geneva (2023), which navigated between waves and currents of thought to critically assess the discipline’s foundations and imagine its future directions beyond the academy, and as a subdiscipline that engaged other strands of anthropology. The meeting in Bologna (2024) then explored the challenges and possibilities of engaging with Global Health, critiquing its reproduction of a North-South divide and calling for a critical, interdisciplinary expansion of the field to include non-human actors and decolonial perspectives. Annual Meetings have tried to understand how to include a broader and pluralistic view of the discipline. Finally, in considering plural perspectives (Tilburg 2025), we have come to realise that we need to mark the political, theoretical and anthropological discourse surrounding medical anthropology that young academics are addressing today.

Our aim as MAYS is to take stock of the methodological and epistemological questions that have emerged from previous years, while looking ahead to the conceptual reconfigurations the discipline now faces. This plenary takes stock of how young scholars see themselves articulating the theoretical contributions of medical anthropology within interdisciplinary spaces, including public health, global health, and digital medicine; how we envision cultivating plural methodological repertoires and challenge extractive or reductive forms of applied research? Indeed, environmental anthropology is becoming a lead scientific approach, medical anthropologists are now increasingly present in critical data studies projects, geography and social epidemiology departments. While this opens new opportunities for young medical anthropologists, leaves us at times feeling that the direction may be blurred.

Thus, this roundtable aims to grapple the changing theoretical landscape in a contemporary multi- and interdisciplinary trajectory, the drastic acceleration of research work involving both investigation methodologies and the production of articles and, the precariousness that has always affected academics, but which today is part of a context of particularly scarce economic resources that are increasing inequalities between the global North and South. This plenary invites a plural, transregional, and forward-looking about how young scholars imagine the future of medical anthropology. We specifically reflect on our perspective of the evolution of the field through our experience past MAYS meeting, and ask how we can better position ourselves methodologically, institutionally, and politically for the challenges ahead. The speakers of the plenary specifically consider four themes:

• Structural precarity and inequalities in a changing world;
• Methodological challenges and developments;
• Renewed theoretical trajectories;
• Interdisciplinarity and public role of young medical anthropologists;
• Future perspective for MAYS as a community.

Participants:

Moderator: Simona Maisano – University of foreigners of Siena

Chair: Matteo Valoncini – University of Bologna

Participants: Avilasha Ghosh, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi; Magdalena Góralska, University of Warsaw; Xu Liu, Goldsmith University; Mirko Pasquini, Assistant Professor the University of Gothenburg, Robert Dean Smith, Candidate Geneva Institute.

18 September 2025 | 18:00-19:30 | HS 1

This plenary session is composed of two parts: a talk by Didier Fassin, following the publication of his book Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (Verso Books 2025); and a roundtable with scholars who have worked on matters of social suffering and violence.

•  „Reflections on Damaged Lives“ (Didier Fassin, Collège de France, Paris, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
  
  In the « Dedication » of Minima Moralia, which is subtitled Reflections from Damaged Lives, Theodor Adorno makes the astonishing confession that his book has been written during the Second World War without any mention of what was happening in the country he had fled after having been persecuted as a Jew. For social scientists and public intellectuals writing today, it is not possible to ignore what the mass murder and complete destruction unfolding in Gaza mean for the global moral and political order. One cannot not take seriously the question of Palestinians’ damaged lives,  both as they are experienced and as they are suppressed, as they are deprived of their dignity by the Israeli political and military forces, and of their truth by the governments of most Western countries and a large part of their media. The lecture will propose a theoretical framework to reflect on the unequal value of lives based on the tragic fate of Palestinians in the past century and more specifically the past two years.

• „Politicising Wounds: From Injured Bodies to Social Suffering in War-Ridden Contexts“ (María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra, University of Vienna, and Frida Robles, University of Applied Arts, Vienna)
  
  The  roundtable uses the ‘wound’ as an entry point to examine how places mired in violence shape the physical and the political body.  By focusing on the concept of the wound itself, we shift the focus from abstract accounts of war to the understanding of being wounded as an embodied, social and political experience in both specific local contexts and across the world. The panellists draw on their research and lived experiences from aftermath of Beirut explosions in Lebanon, in global humanitarian medicine, on wound culture, development-related distress in Pakistan, and health and well-being in Rohingya communities living in the US/UK. By engaging with the wounded body, both physically and metaphorically, in these field sites, but also in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the panellists address “how woundedness becomes a relational, communal, and political condition within chronically debilitated infrastructures“ (Seroujian, 2025). 

Broadly and in conversation with Didier Fassin’s talk, the roundtable questions how medical anthropology as a field can reckon with its complicity in colonial violence historically and contemporarily, and take a more active role in contributing to liberation and justice for all peoples.

Panelists: 

Yasmynn Chowdhury, University of Oxford

Laila Rajani, University of Edinburgh

Dr. Doris Burtscher, Médecins Sans Frontières 

Narod Seroujian, American University of Beirut

Prof. Harris Solomon, Duke Global Health Institute