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• 36. Exploring health in the context of territorial inequalities

  Abstract

  Conveners: Daniele Karasz, Sladana Adamovic, Adrienne Homberger

  Abstract: Ethnographic research is becoming increasingly important in the analysis of territorial inequalities in Europe and beyond, with health and healthcare playing a crucial role (Hussain et al. 2024). Accordingly, we welcome research on how territorial inequality affects health, well-being, and access to healthcare and social services in different local contexts. It will explore intersecting structural factors, such as poor housing conditions, immobility, unhealthy working conditions or environmental and systemic inaction impacting health and well-being. Further, it examines whether and how national and local policies exacerbate health-related vulnerabilities in certain areas by neglecting infrastructure renewal, underfunding public services, and creating systemic barriers to equitable health outcomes for marginalised communities. A special focus lies on how the latter foster a sense of being “left behind” and neglected among communities living in marginalized areas. 

  We aim to explore strategies that communities develop to counteract local challenges. We especially welcome contributions highlighting how civil society organisations and grassroots initiatives – often led by women, queer and racialised communities - act against these structural barriers, by addressing health related vulnerabilities within their communities. Such initiatives may create alternative networks of support and challenge the status quo of exclusionary policies. Therefore, it examines the conditions necessary for such approaches to succeed. 

  The panel will foster a discussion on how territorial inequalities shape health outcomes and deepen perceptions of exclusion. Simultaneously, we aim to underline pathways for rebuilding trust through sustainable and inclusive interventions. We invite submissions grounded in ethnographic research, critical policy analysis, and community-led interventions.
• 42. History in Care: Tracing Historical Entanglements

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Kristine Krause, Monika Palmberger

  Abstract: This panel explores the lingering presence of history in spaces, practices, and narratives of care, challenging the tendency to focus only on the ‘new’ in moments of health and care crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This panel invites contributions that interrogate when and how history lingers on or returns in unexpected ways.  Health crises such as Covid have exposed the often invisible role of care, revealed hidden hierarchies and prompted redefinitions of health and well-being.

  Care practices - how, where, and by whom they are delivered - are shaped by historical legacies of interconnectedness and hierarchy, including colonial and imperial histories. These pasts not only influence individual experiences but also embed care within broader collectives, marked by status, gender, and racialized inequalities.

  Bringing "historicity" back to medical anthropology and the anthropology of care, this panel invites papers that build on and expand seminal work in medical anthropology and care studies (e.g., Medical Anthropology 2018, 37(8), and History and Anthropology 2021, 32(4)). The focus is on the historical dimensions of:

  • Spaces (regions and buildings) where care occurs,
  • Practices, routines, and protocols of care,
  • Entitlements, relationships, and belonging,
  • Narratives and subject positions.

  Privileging “history in care” over “history of care”, we understand care as a central element of social organisation (Thelen 2015) that can make historical entanglements visible in particular ways. We welcome contributions that address questions of who provides care, where care takes place, and how practices and narratives related to pasts evolve around care relations.
• 45. Making sense of mortality in the era of polycrisis

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Maija Butters

  Abstract: In an era defined by systemic crises—ecological collapse, geopolitical strife, economic instability, and public health emergencies—death and mortality seem to surround us in multiple forms. The concept of  "Thanatocene," (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2015) encapsulates the pervasive spectre of death that looms over contemporary society, highlighting the threats to life and well-being that characterise our current epoch. Yet, simultaneously, we witness a paradoxical obsession towards human immortality, which takes the forms of imaginative digital technological innovations, as well as the extreme medicalisation of every aspect of life.

  In this panel, we seek to critically examine how individuals and/or communities navigate the practices and politics of decline and death in the context of the current polycrisis around the world. We welcome papers that scrutinise various responses to individual, social, and ecological aspects of death and how those might reflect broader political dynamics. In light of the overwhelming crises we face, how does our understanding of mortality shift, and what implications does this have for our political and ethical frameworks?

  We invite scholars to explore how individuals and communities are responding in the face of the polycrisis. Different approaches to death-related practices and negotiations are welcomed in the presentations, including:

  • Medical technologies concerning death and longevity
  • Policies and rhetoric of control/decision-making regarding death and/or prolonging life
  • Medical solutions for existential, psychological, or social matters related to death
  • Digital and/or virtual responses to individual, social, or planetary death
  • Religious and/or aesthetic responses to individual, social, or planetary (im)mortality
• 49. (Post)socialist health and medicine: examining alternative political economies, biopolitics and circulations

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Alila Brossard Antonielli, Nils Graber

  Abstract: After the Cold War, the experiences of socialist health models have been rendered invisible, with capitalist health systems becoming the default. Ethnographies have shown the transformations of the post-socialist transition leading to privatisation, the emigration of health professionals, and the continuities of some organisations and practices. A growing body of historiography is focusing on the diversity of medical knowledge in training and research, public health interventions, pharmaceutical and biomedical production in former and current socialist countries, also paying attention to the circulations to and from the Global South, and beyond states, within organisations and social movements. With the ongoing austerity policies impacting health systems since 2008, the hospital crisis accelerated by the Coronavirus pandemic and the continuous inequality of access to pharmaceutical products, there is growing interest for alternative models from socialist experiences. While socialist practices are often fraught with contradictions and tensions, sometimes leading to failed experiments and exploitative practices, we believe that they are worthy of consideration in their diversity and their own dynamics. This panel invites researchers from medical anthropology and other disciplines to interrogate (post) socialist medicine and health models and how their continuities and/or legacies shaped current health practices, looking at former state socialist countries and beyond, including local organisations and social movements. We welcome papers dwelling on the circulations of medical ideas and their materialities; care practices; public health interventions; medical technologies and pharmaceutical production and distribution; between social medicine and socialist medicine; and the relations between health professionals, patients, state and non-state actors. 

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• R11. Crisis of Digital Addictions: Anthropological Perspectives on a Growing Concern

  Abstract

  Conveners: Suzana Jovicic

  Abstract: While substance-based addictions have long been subject of crisis narratives and regulatory initiatives, behavioural addictions remain a relatively peripheral and awkward category, often eluding diagnostic frameworks. However, the last decade has brought digital addictions into the public spotlight with a renewed sense of urgency. Despite considerable public scrutiny, there is still little consensus on this subject across disciplines. This is partly due to the profound and provocative questions that the debate, ranging from wellbeing to harm, raises in relation to previously taken-for-granted assumptions: What can constitute an object of addiction? How should social relationships be constructed? To what extent can technologies be understood to possess (addictive) agency? Is disconnection truly desirable and for whom?

  This roundtable seeks to develop a distinctly anthropological perspective on digital addiction and harms, a topic which to date has received little attention within anthropology. It will do so through an expansive and robust conversation, that embraces both sceptical and concerned voices. The roundtable is part of a larger initiative culminating in an edited volume on digital addictions (Tulasiewicz & Jovicic, forthcoming). 

  We invite abstracts that address contentious issues surrounding digital addiction, ranging from models of causality to treatment modalities or epistemological authorities. Roundtable participants will be invited to contribute to the debate by preparing brief statements on overreaching questions shared in advance.  

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• 4. Intersecting Frontiers: Towards understanding intersections among climate change, culture, gender, and health in the Anthropocene

  Abstract

  Conveners: Sadiq Bhanbhro, Inayat Ali

  Presentations:

  Wednesday, September 17, 2025 | Slot 2 & 3 | Room 2-0-1

  Ana Cerezuela: Making future in a changing climate: Maternal experiences of environmental risk and strategies for sustaining life in Barcelona

  Farzana Habib: Syndemics of Food Insecurity, Mental illness, Tobacco use and Gender: Exploring the vulnerability of slum women in Dhaka City, Bangladesh

  Eswarappa KASI: Health Emergency of Gond and Panika Women during the Pandemic: An Empirical Study from Anuppur District of Madhya Pradesh, Central India

  Isabelle Lange: Heat, risk, and gendered agency: Technocratic responses to climate change and the politics of maternal health

  Young Su Park: Gendered Vulnerabilities of Female-Headed Households and Health Impact of Climate Crisis in Kiribati

  Isabella M. Radhuber: Health Under Climate Pressure: An Emerging Research Agenda

  Megan Schmidt-Sane: Climate change, informality, and sexual and reproductive health: An emergent “syndemic” in Kampala, Uganda
• 24. Decoupling Health and Well-Being in Contexts of Conflict and Environmental Distress

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Ahmad Moradi, Letizia Bonanno 

  Abstract: Health and well-being are often treated as inseparable, yet there are circumstances where this connection is disrupted, exposing the fragility of “living well,” particularly in contexts marked by conflict, inequality, and environmental distress. While health typically refers to an individual’s physical or mental condition, well-being encompasses broader social and embodied experiences that may diverge from biomedical norms. Decoupling health from well-being in these contexts foregrounds how people navigate prescribed rules, embodying what Ghassan Hage calls ‘negotiated being’ (2018), and adapting to ‘uncertain terrains’ (Vigh 2009).

  We invite ethnographically grounded contributions that highlight moments where the pursuit of well-being—whether individual or collective—clashes with public health frameworks, revealing the ethical and political stakes of living well in a troubled world. 

  We are thus interested in those ethnographic examples in which well-being is forged through compromised individual’s health, as seen in Humanitarian literature, or in James R. Welch’s (2023) work in the Central Brazilian Cerrados, where collective loss and suffering paradoxically become the bedrock of living well. By exploring these dynamics, the panel welcomes critical engagement with how people inhabit and sustain themselves and others amidst persistent threats to life and thriving.

  To deepen this discussion, the panel poses the following questions:

  • Is there well-being in absence of health?
  • How is well-being sustained when health is compromised, especially in conflict or environmental distress?
  • What does well-being look like for those with chronic conditions or dealing with treatment side effects and shortages?
  • How is well-being redefined when health is unattainable, and what alternatives arise?
• 26. Unstable Environments: Health and Healing in Remote Places

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Meoïn Hagège, Laura Burke 

  Abstract: This panel takes remote island landscapes of health and well-being as its starting point to discuss how areas, which are geographically, logistically and politically marginalised, abandoned or neglected, experience illness and healing and encounters with the State that emerge from seeking care. It explores the ‘environment’ as a wider social and physical space permeated by local and global inequalities inherited by colonial histories. It draws on Street’s description of ‘unstable places’, which are characterised by poor health infrastructure, institutional instability and medical uncertainty (Street, 2014). In such areas, biomedicine comes up against the limits of its practices and technologies (or lack thereof) and medicinal care must be continually reinvented and reimagined (2014,12). Rather than receiving life-saving or life-making healthcare, places might face ‘abandonment’ rather than assistance (Munro and Widmer 2023) or (un)intentional neglect (Beal et al. 2025). Places of instability, marginalised by state care structures and international assistance, logistical distance, and lack of technologies and human resources, redefine how illness and healing are experienced. How do marginalised communities living in unstable environments balance health and well-being with the risks of reaching treatment? What happens when treatment is out of reach due to long distances, costs, weather, and risky journeys? How does access to or abandonment from health and social care affect these spaces? Crucially how are health and the environment being reenvisioned in the process? Submissions should be empirical studies in the social sciences including but not limited to fieldwork in remote island spaces or isolated communities.
• 32. Rethinking Species Extinction and Disease Eradication

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Rebecca Marsland, James Staples

  Abstract: What makes us fear the extinction of certain species and celebrate the eradication of others? Though disease eradication and species extinction both result in the disappearance of a species, their dynamics and implications differ significantly. Valued species like bees or orangutans face extinction at alarming speeds, often defying human intervention, while the eradication of disease vectors such as mosquitoes or millennial old bacteria is extremely challenging. Extinction and eradication are typically examined separately; by bringing them together our aim is to rethink both.

  This session seeks contributions based on fieldwork that explore how these processes unfold and interact, and address the ethical and ideological dilemmas that emerge when we think about extinction and eradication together. We ask how the theories that underpin practice might be rooted in western, colonial, ableist, and anthropocentric ways of thinking about human health and the natural worlds as something that can be ordered into normative forms of life that are valued, or that can be eliminated as pathological or foreign, and what alternatives might exist or be newly thought.

  Contributions might address care and its contradictions, methods and technologies such as maps and surveys, or the different technical meanings and ethical resonances within which eradication and extinction are ‘done’ and thought about. They might ask what critiques arise from the experience of communities in places where extinction and eradication unfold and are enacted? By intertwining these narratives this session aims to rethink how human and environmental health intersect within a politics of erasure.
• 33. Places of well-being: exploring space and relationality in redefining the concept of well-being

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Danai Toursoglou-Papalexandrou, Dimitris Ballas, Elli Papastergiou

  Abstract: In an ever-changing and hyperconnected global landscape, cities face multidimensional challenges that often escalate into crises. Urbanization, while a driver of economic growth and development, contributes significantly to environmental pollution and climate change. Simultaneously, cities suffer the implications of environmental degradation which increasingly disrupt daily life and exacerbate disparities in socioeconomic status, health, and well-being. Considering that the expansion of urban settings is deeply entwined with unequal power dynamics, structural oppression, and discriminatory practices, environmental degradation adds another layer to socio-spatial segregation. Unequal access to quality environments (e.g., green spaces), increasing vulnerability to extreme weather events, energy insecurity, etc., disproportionally affect the health and well-being of marginalized communities, such as refugees and migrants, people of color, ethnic minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged individuals. At the same time, it has been observed that these communities have the capacity to generate innovative processes towards equitable access and response. These challenges are deeply spatial and highlight a pressing environmental justice issue and a need for an integrative, multi-level understanding of well-being and its interrelationship with other factors. This session invites contributions that examine spatial and relational dimensions of well-being and the consequences of rising inequality, focusing on the micro-spatial and urban scales. We encourage both empirical and theoretical contributions, approaching subjective well-being from various perspectives, and employing methodologies ranging from quantitative analysis to qualitative, community-driven knowledge and participatory and memory processes. We particularly welcome multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions that foster dialogue and knowledge exchange between the Global North and Global South.

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• R02. Bodies and Environments as Infrastructure: Injury, Extraction, and Resistance in Transnational Food Systems

  Abstract

  Conveners: Gerardo Rodriguez Solis, Seth M. Holmes

  Abstract: Transnational industrial food systems rely heavily on a workforce made of migrants who face low pay, substandard working conditions, and increased health risks. These food systems simultaneously rely on ecosystems, landscapes, and waterways that face overuse, overheating, and toxification. Putting together critical studies of bodies and exposures with recent turns toward infrastructural analyses, we will examine the simultaneous exploitation and injury of migrant farm worker bodies and the extraction and toxification of environments in transnational food systems. This roundtable considers both worker bodies and environments as critical pieces of food system infrastructures, often taken for granted by societies until they no longer function. We turn our ethnographic and theoretical attention to the experiences and resistances of the bodily and environmental components of infrastructures through which many European and North American societies are fed. 

  Building from ethnographic studies of diverse food chains – e.g., intra-EU mobile workers in agriculture, migrant supply chain and farmworkers in the US, and health professionals in agro-industrial regions of Mexico, we theorize transnational infrastructures that produce injury and extraction and that workers resist and remake. In this roundtable, we will analyze various examples of bodily injury and environmental degradation in transnational food systems. We conclude with a focus on how workers address resulting challenges, particularly their strategies to navigate precarious jobs, work against socio-economic marginalization, and access and re-imagine healthcare between transnational food systems.

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• 3. Confronting the Inevitable

  Abstract

  Conveners: Matthew Wolf-Meyer

  Presentations:

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 1 & 2 | Room 4-0-6

  Elspeth Davies: Challenging the Inevitability of Cancer Deaths in the UK’s National Health Service

  Sinem Gunes: “They Don’t Know Either”: Side Effects, Hormonal Therapy, and the Limits of Medical Knowledge in Breast Cancer Care

  Annette Leibing: Inevitable aging: Punks’ and Jehova’s Witnesses’ ‘apocalyptic futures’

  Jaya Mathur: Skimming the Edge of the Painful Body: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Contested Disease Category of Fibromyalgia in India

  Anthony Rizk: At the end of privatized healthcare: Economic collapse and the alter-politics of health in Lebanon

  Arnav Sethi: ‘Still Sub-Therapeutic’: Ethnographic Reflections on Evidence-Based Lithium Prescribing in the UK

  Livia Wright: Confronting the Inevitable: Dementia Between Medical and Social Worlds
• 9. Sustaining life in debilitated environments: expanding ideas of contagion, chronicity and care in the “age of disability”

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Júlia Fernandez, Rosamund Greiner

  Presentations:

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 3  | Room 4-0-6

  Samiksha Bhan: Dis/abling Cure: Medical humanitarianism, therapeutic markets and the failure of proximate care for thalassemia-affected in India

  Emma Bunkley: Interembodiment, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Health

  Maria Elisa Dainelli: The contagion of suicide - Good and bad death in ethnoclinical context

  Marcela González-Agüero: Appealing for the right to live: Care, precarity and the risk of a slow death for Chilean children and young people with SMA

  Daniela Jacob Pinto: Feeling each other's pain: injury and healing amongst citizens mutilated in protests in present day France

  Narod Seroujian: Debilitated Bodies, Relational Wounds: (Un)stitching Care in Lebanon

  Ramsha Usman: Always Injured, Never Disabled: Workers Health in Sustainable Ecologies of Production

  Lindsay Vogt: Others in the Self: (Inter)corporeality and Affective Entanglement between Mother, Daughter, and Home in End-of-Life Care

   

   
• 17. Care and Transition in Chronic and Rare Conditions

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Malgorzata Rajtar, Eva-Maria Knoll

  Abstract: Developments in medicine and medical technologies have significantly reduced mortality in many chronic and rare conditions. People with these conditions - many of which start in childhood - are now living longer, even into adulthood. Novel gene therapies enable living with a chronic disease and give people hope for a cure. In this dynamic healthcare landscape, practices of giving and receiving care and self-care are in transition; they are “in situ enactments of long-term transformations of human relationships, informed by fantasies of futurity and post hoc perceptions of experience” (Cook and Trundle 2020:178). 

  In this panel, we will interrogate the relationship between care and transition(s) in the globally changing healthcare landscape characterized by competing political, medical, socio-economic, migrational, and religious agendas and concerns. Focusing on chronic and rare conditions, we seek to critically examine how practices of care and self-care are “unsettled” (Cook and Trundle 2020) and/or “unsettling” (Murphy 2015) in the context of transition; how transition can be redefined to go beyond biomedical care; and how anthropologists may illuminate temporal, spacial, and sensorial dimensions of caring and transition(s). We are also interested in contributions which attend to non-human actors in the transition process.

  We invite ethnographically grounded contributions from medical anthropologists as well as scholars in science and technology studies, critical disability studies, feminist ethics, and critical global health, among others. We are also open to engaged submissions that draw from scholarship in graphic medicine and/or sensorial studies.
• 19. Entangled temporalities of the experience of “chronic living” with technological devices

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Agathe Camus, Lucie Dalibert, Valentine Gourinat

  Abstract: Disability and chronic illness have become a privileged place for technological intervention. Both are characterized by the deployment of technological devices that aim to mitigate, compensate for, or even prevent and slow down the loss of capacities, as well as alleviate or limit symptoms. In this context, a varied array of technologies that differently act on or intervene in bodies and places are introduced in people’s lives (e.g. insulin pumps, prostheses, dialysis equipment, telecare, etc.).

  Regarding this ‘technological care’ (Lancelot & Guchet, 2023), research in STS and medical anthropology has mainly focused on technological use and appropriation, including the difficulties thereof. However vital and essential these technologies may be in sustaining people in daily life, attention has scarcely been paid to their fragility and people’s resulting vulnerability when they malfunction, wear and tear, break and/or thus can no longer be used or have to be adjusted and/or used differently (Oudshoorn, 2020). 

  These material and existential disruptions and constraints call for inquiring about the entanglements of different temporalities of chronic living (Wahlberg & al., 2021): of bodies adjusting to chronic illness, disability and/or to technological care; of the technologies themselves (from their development to their everyday use, adaptation, malfunctions and maintenance) and the socio-material infrastructures that support them; and of the relations between them. We invite contributions that address technological care and its temporalities in the context of disability and chronic illness.
• 21. Exhaustion as a temporal and social predicament

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Mette Bech Risør, Ayo Wahlberg, Emily Mendenhall, Karin Friederic

  Abstract: Existential exhaustion is a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary societies, affecting people of all ages in various ways. Societies worldwide are marked by social, temporal, and technological acceleration, leading to burnout, exhaustion, and complete weariness. Additionally, global issues such as climate change, war, and displacement intensify the strains of human existence. This manifests differently across life stages: adolescents experience mental distress perpetuated by forms of digital exhaustion, young women may choose not to become mothers, employees suffer from burnout, and elderly individuals become worn out, requiring care which can, in turn, generate caregiver burnout.

  In these ways, exhaustion can be seen as both a structural by-product and an existential affliction, just as it may develop into a medical condition or be directly linked to the embodied effects of chronic conditions, highlighting a challenging intersection between symptoms of exhaustion and the medical system. This panel invites papers exploring questions such as: How does exhaustion affect the body, life, and social relations? How is exhaustion sensed, managed and met, considering social inequality? How does exhaustion impact or redefine ethical practices? How does exhaustion manifest in ‘energy-limiting conditions’ within the medical system? How is exhaustion understood and configured in everyday life, biomedical settings, and socio-cultural and political contexts?

  Exhaustion challenges our daily routines and practices. It has the potential to transform lived experiences, shaping perceptions of the good life and everyday ethics. While exhaustion disrupts the temporality of life, it may also create new forms of time management and subjectivity.

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• R03. Tracing Neurodiversity in the Global South: Reimagining Identity, Community, & Care

  Abstract

  Conveners: Paras Arora, Shubha Ranganathan

  Abstract: Reframing differences in cognitive styles and abilities as being crucial to human diversity, neurodiversity is a putative framework that is being increasingly celebrated as an essential mode of claim-making and self-fashioning by disabled individuals and advocates across the world. Pushing the social model of (dis)ability towards radically equitable ends, neurodiversity does more than introduce new regimes of value in ableist contexts. It also reorganizes forms of care, connection, and rehabilitation that people with neurologically divergent dispositions routinely find themselves entangled within. Yet, the dissemination of neurodiversity as an identity and framework is often recited as a unilateral and disruptive movement from the Global North to the Global South. Our panel seeks to ethnographically trace other genealogies of neurodiversity as it continues to be increasingly reclaimed and refashioned by a range of stakeholders in the Global South. Some of the questions that the papers may interrogate include: How is neurodiversity translated into the relational worlds of disabled individuals and their communities of support and obligation? How does disability advocacy reckon with cognitive disabilities differently under the sway of neurodiversity? How might neurodiversity coexist with other frameworks of rehabilitating cognitive variance? How do neurological differences get mutually constituted and experienced alongside other matrices of power such as gender, sexuality, caste, class, ethnicity, and race? The panel seeks thematic, methodological, and geographical diversity in order to sufficiently represent the multitude of ways in which neurodiversity is lived with, aspired towards, and mobilized in everyday life across the Global South.
• R15. The Role of the Disabled Artist in the Polycrisis — Lived Experience, Chronicity, and Interdependence

  Abstract

  Conveners: Justus Harris, Liza Bernstein

  Abstract: The pandemic and climate crises are highlighting the interconnectedness of individual and collective health, and artists with disabilities play a key role in shaping a sustainable path forward. While artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, and Van Gogh are well-known, the contemporary lived experiences of disabled artists in reimagining societal health are less recognized.

  Artists affect, provoke, soothe, and share unique perspectives essential to society's well-being.

  Co-convenors Justus Harris, a Berlin-based American artist with type 1 diabetes and patient experience strategist, and Liza Bernstein, a Brazil-based, South African-American interdisciplinary artist, patient experience strategist, and founding member of Stanford Medicine X’s ePatient Scholar program who is NED (No Evidence of Disease) from three cancers, will facilitate this roundtable centering ePatient artists.

  ePatients innovate engaging with the healthcare ecosystem as well as with technology, to improve their individual and community health. ePatient artists expand definitions of health and disability by expressing their lived experiences and technological adaptations, influencing culture.

  This roundtable will include up to four additional ePatient artists from diverse intersectional backgrounds, connecting with delegates to explore how these experiences can inform more equitable relationships and policies.

  Questions addressed include:

  • What unique perspectives do disabled artists bring to interconnected global crises?
  • What lessons can disabled artists offer in fostering vulnerable, interdependent relationships of care across intersections?
  • What are the impacts and challenges of having an art practice on the lives of chronically ill/disabled artists?
  • How do disabled artists influence cultural conversations in fractured, hostile online and offline social environments?

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• 14. Forever Chemicals and Reproductive Health: Anthropological Perspectives on Inequities, Alternatives, and Policy Dialogs

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Pratyusha Kiran

  Presentations:

  Wednesday, September 17, 2025 | Slot 1  | Room 4-0-6

  Edmée Ballif: Toxic reproduction: Preventing endocrine disruption in an unequal world

  Eleonora Bechis: Negotiating Environmental Harm: A Comparative Ethnography of PFAS-Affected Communities in Piemont, Veneto and the Lyon region

  Marie De Lutz: Materialities of menstrual health: menstrual technologies, toxicants, and sex hormones in the Women of the Sea surf club
• 18. Navigating Reproductive Ambivalence: Strategies and Subjectivities across the Global North and South

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Poonam Kamath, Luminita Mandache 

  Abstract: Human reproduction has always been marked by uncertainty. Throughout history, humans have sought to control and shape how reproduction is performed, embodied, and expressed. Demographic anxiety permeates both Global North and South alike (De Zordo, Mare, and Smietana 2022), with accelerated state, private, and third-sector efforts to either drastically reduce fertility rates in certain global regions, or increase them in others (Morgan and Robert 2012). In this context, this panel focuses on the reproductive trajectories that shape reproductive subjectivities, generating new identities, coping strategies, and sense-making amidst uncertainties and conflicting and competing gender, family, and demographic ideologies. 

  The goal of the panel is to use the umbrella-term ambivalence to document, describe, and theorize how uncertainty and precarity shape reproductive subjectivity. This panel examines (i) how entanglements with a range of reproductive technologies—that shape the most intimate spheres of human life—affect kin-making practices, particularly through the lenses of reproductive challenges (Tober 2019); (ii) how people strategize their reproductive choices within their broader social and moral worlds and competing global ideologies about gender, family and politics (Inhorn 2003; Mamo 2007), and (iii) the role of uncertainty (Huang 2022, Johnson-Hanks, 2006; Inhorn and Smith-Hefner 2021), inherent in individual reproductive lives, in shaping larger social dynamics.
• 22. Neo-Eugenic Practices and Reproductive Governance across the Globe

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Lucia Gentile, Clémence Jullien 

  Abstract: While historically enforced through medical technologies and state policies—often with elements of coercion—eugenic ideologies persist today in more subtle forms. These ideologies are reflected in voluntary social, ritual, and dietary practices embraced by individuals and communities. This panel seeks to examine contemporary practices aimed at enhancing future generations, exploring their manifestations across the globe through three interrelated dimensions.

  First, it examines the prevalent discourse of crisis, analyzing how narratives of social and biological degradation are invoked to legitimize urgent calls for improving progeny. Second, it investigates the governance of reproductive bodies, uncovering how these practices intersect with broader social inequalities and gender dynamics. Finally, the panel explores the tools and mechanisms deployed by neo-eugenicists by paying particular attention to the circulation of practices and the way in which knowledge from different epistemes coexists. 

  By addressing the fine line between health-oriented practices during the perinatal period and deliberate attempts to enhance progeny, this panel seeks to redefine notions of health and well-being. Contributions from interdisciplinary specialists (medical anthropologists, medical historians, medical sociologists, etc.) drawing on recent empirical research, will foster a critical debate on the relevance of the neo-eugenics framework, which emphasizes individual responsibility and self-management. This approach aligns with neoliberal ideologies of health, productivity, and optimization, offering insights into the evolving discourse surrounding reproductive practices and their societal implications.
• 35. Redefining Reproductive Temporalities: Bodies, Gender, Care, and Contestations in Health and Well-Being

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Falia Varelaki, Alessandra  Brigo, Manon M.S. Vialle

  Abstract: The temporalities of reproductive life—including abortion care, obstetric care, and broader reproductive experiences—are deeply connected with gendered notions of body, care, health and well-being. This panel proposes to examine how time is constructed, negotiated, and contested in reproductive health practices and policies, and in the lived experiences of individuals navigating these temporalities. We aim to unpack the power dynamics that are embedded in the above. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, this panel invites scholars, practitioners and activists to critically engage with the politics of reproductive time, offering insights into how temporalities shape and are shaped by broader efforts to redefine health and well-being. It welcomes contributions that explore how temporal notions in reproductive health (e.g., gestational age; waiting periods; labour progression; “biological clock”; age-related infertility; early menopause; postponement of maternity/paternity; etc.) inform reproductive policies and mediate care practices and decision-making. The panel interrogates how the embodied temporalities of those navigating reproductive pathways, including in contexts of crisis, precarity, or inequality, develop in relation to dominant frameworks. We ask whether and how alternative and inclusive temporalities emerge that challenge oppressive or controlling use of temporal tools and norms and promote person-centered and equitable care. By centering abortion and obstetric care, and reproductive life more broadly, the panel seeks to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of care and justice in reproductive health. The panel is convened by members of the ERC project PregDaT on abortion and childbirth temporalities.
• 37. Genital Expectations: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Gendered Meanings, Norms, and Practices Surrounding Genitalia (V3 Part I)

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Hannelore Van Bavel, Vivien Lou

  Abstract: Genitalia are often treated as taboo – hidden from view and avoided in conversation. Yet, paradoxically, they hold profound socio-cultural significance. Societies ascribe a range of meanings, norms, and expectations to genitalia, shaping how they are perceived and understood in relation to broader ideas about gender and sexuality and their intersection with other aspects of identity, including race, class, religion, and disability. 

  This panel explores the meanings attributed to genitalia, alongside the norms and expectations surrounding them. It investigates how these meanings and norms vary across cultural and historical contexts, while also considering points of similarity and continuity. The panel is particularly interested in how these cultural meanings, norms, and expectations shape people’s perceptions of, relationships to, and engagement with genitalia – whether their own or others’. Engagement might encompass practices such as body modification, including hair removal or genital surgeries, which may reflect efforts to align with cultural ideals but can also serve as acts of self-expression, bodily autonomy, or a way to forge new meanings. It can also involve celebrating and reimagining genitalia – through vulva-positive art or by embracing body parts that deviate from societal norms – as a means of fostering self-acceptance or celebrating diversity. 

  We welcome papers from diverse disciplines and perspectives, including anthropology, gender studies, sociology, history, art, and activism. Submissions that highlight intersectional perspectives or draw on marginalised or non-Western experiences are especially welcome.
• 39. Obstetric Violence, Care, and Technologies

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Elif Gül, Rodante van der Waal

  Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing number of research and activism on obstetrics as a field marked by systemic inequalities and injustices. Scholars and activists have critically examined obstetric practices, technological advancements, epistemological frameworks, and violence perpetrated in obstetrics in the name of safety. While the medicalization of childbirth and the institutional dynamics of hospitals have been studied since the second feminist wave, the concept of ‘obstetric violence’ has gained only significant attention in the past 20 years, by now earning its place in various laws as a form of violence against women.  

  The European Commission's 2024 report on obstetric violence states that between 21% and 81% of pregnant people- depending on the member state- experience some form of obstetric violence during childbirth. However, many countries lack representative studies. The prevalence of obstetric violence is often rooted in broader systemic issues, including patriarchal structures, the colonial and racist history of gynecology, and capitalist norms embedded in healthcare systems. Marginalized groups- such as trans and nonbinary individuals, fat people, older birthing individuals, and those from marginalized ethnic and religious communities- often face compounded and intersectional experiences of violence within obstetric care.

  How should we understand violence in a discipline that aims to care? How can we develop understandings of health care and well-being that are radically exclusionary of violence? This panel seeks to engage with traditional and developing interdisciplinary perspectives on health and well-being during childbirth from various fields, including Reproductive Justice, feminist science-and technology studies (STS), and medical-anthropology.
• 40. Environments of Care and Harm: Pushing the Boundaries of SRHR Research

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Andie Thompson

  Abstract: Today, reproductive health programs and justice movements face severe threats from genocidal conflicts, far-right politics, ‘anti-gender’ movements and sentiments, and the expansion of neoliberal biomedical systems. The outcomes of these processes directly hinder sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) across the globe. Threats to how and for whom reproductive care can be given are not a new topic of inquiry, nor are the politics of erasure and oppression that propagate them. However, the collective responses to these threats and new transdisciplinary forms of co-creation across expertise and geographic locations are less examined. In this global environment, where institutions of capitalist exploitation perpetuate cultures of harm, how do communities, care providers, and researchers navigate fraught political landscapes to co-create spaces of care in the sphere of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights?  In this panel, we invite anthropologists and other social scientists who work on SRHR and reproductive justice to share case studies of how diverse social actors build, reproduce, challenge, and navigate environments of harm related to sexual and reproductive well-being and create environments of care marked by equity and justice. Through stories drawn from research with various communities of practice—such as health practitioners, maternal and fetal health scientists, and reproductive justice activists—we will reflect together on possible ways forward in global systems that divide feminist and queer movements and perpetuate systems of oppression that hinder the advancement of reproductive justice.
• 41. Care Unsettled: Queer in Medical Anthropology

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Christopher Zraunig, Max Schnepf

  Abstract: In institutionalized settings and interpersonal encounters, care can heal as much as it can harm. Understood as material practice, political ethos, and affective engagement, feminist scholars have long engaged with care’s ambiguous allure—critically examining its gendered divisions, questioning its portrayal as inherently nurturing, and mobilizing its potential to inhabit a damaged planet. This panel asks how queer analytics, sensibilities, and cases can further unsettle care as a site of creativity, serendipity, and possibly also resistance.

  We seek to examine how normative understandings of human and planetary health are complicated by practices and affects that might be described as queer: subversive, potentially transformative, and eluding clear classification. We invite scholars to explore  queer approaches as they afford possibilities for tinkering with and reimagining constellations of care—whether for oneself or for human and non-human others. Rather than limiting “queer” to denote anti-normative identities, this panel emphasizes convergences,  complexities and contradictions inherent in care arrangements, shedding light on how caregivers and care-receivers alike redefine health and well-being in ways that resist or expand institutional frameworks and normative categorizations. What are the boundaries of care? Where does it falter, fail or assume other guises?

  We invite contributions rooted in Queer/Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies that explore themes such as:

  • Workarounds in care settings and their queer(ing) effects.
  • Care provision for and by queer individuals and communities in various geopolitical contexts.
  • Engagements with more-than-human others as a queer mode of healing.
  • Queer ethnographic methods of approaching and practicing care.
• 47. The Uterus: Knowledges, Practices, Imaginaries

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Leah Eades, Marie de Lutz

  Abstract: The uterus is a significant organ, essential to all forms of human biological reproduction and imbued with diverse cultural and political meanings. In recent years, technological advancements, such as ultrasound and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), have made the uterus an increasingly visible object within scientific and social discourse. Its economization through commercial surrogacy has inspired bioethical debates, while the growing influence of the global far-right has seen renewed efforts to legislate and regulate uteruses via access to contraception, abortion and fertility treatments. At the same time, the imaginaries associated with novel womb technologies, such as uterine transplants and artificial uteruses, contain both liberatory and troubling possibilities.

  This panel invites scholars working across the anthropology of reproduction to come together to unpack the knowledges, practices and imaginaries that make up uteruses across a range of ethnographic contexts. Questions you may wish to consider include: what constitutes a “good” or “bad” uterus in your fieldwork? What expectations and requirements are placed upon this organ, and how are they facilitated or inhibited? How do social, economic, and political conditions contribute to different forms of uterine health and harm? And how might foregrounding the uterus in our social analyses contribute to anthropological scholarship on gender, health and technology, as well as to efforts to achieve reproductive justice?

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• R13. “Reproductive Justice”: Are We Doing Justice to the Term?

  Abstract

  Conveners: Kim Sigmund

  Abstract: In 1994, the SisterSong Black Feminist Collective coined the term “reproductive justice” to reflect on the systemic limitations to reproductive health rights faced by women of color, specifically Black women, in the United States. This concept has driven critical conversations, pushed discourse around the intersection of race, sexuality, and reproduction, and allowed for a vast range of research to emerge in the social sciences. This roundtable brings together an array of anthropologists working on issues of reproductive justice, allowing us a moment to reflect on how various disciplines and fields attempt to “do justice” to the aims of the reproductive justice movement in different settings and contexts. How are we effectively applying this concept that is rooted in activism and systemic change in our academic work, especially beyond the United States? What are some of the challenges in doing medical anthropological research through the lenses of intersectionality and reproductive justice? What moments of opportunity and collaboration have been made possible by this approach? In a world moving more towards anti-gender, anti-queer, anti-female global policies, with the backdrop of extreme reproductive injustice in genocidal situations, what lies ahead for those of us working towards reproductive justice and retribution? This roundtable invites anthropologists working on reproductive justice (or interested in) to share their findings, challenges, and possible ways forward.  

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• 1. The rise of the Digital Imaginaries: Redefining global health and well-being

  Abstract

  Conveners: Edwin Ambani Ameso, Azza Mustafa Babikir Ahmed

  Presentations:

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 4 | Room 2-0-1

  Sanaullah Khan: Public Health echo chambers: Contested "science" and vaccine denialism on digital platforms

  José Pinto da Costa: Reimagining Portuguese Digital Healthcare: Future-makers’ insights and concerns

  Shweta Rani: Seeing without data: A Case of Dengue Control in Delhi

  Egnonnam Sandra Dellya Zannou: Care trajectories and experiences of breast cancer patients: a socio-anthropological analysis based on cases observed at the CNHU-HKM in Cotonou
• 8. Bridging the Divide: Connecting Humans and Technology in Algorithmic Cultures

  Abstract

  Conveners: Zongtian Guo, Michal Frumer, Mette Høybye

  Presentations:

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 4  | Room 4-0-4

  Ismail Umar: Imagining AI Futures: Socio-Technical Imaginaries Among Healthcare Professionals in a Dutch Hospital

  Matteo Valoncini: Algorithmic identities and the digitalization of care: an ethnography of General Practice in Italy

  Sophie Wagner: Living in the Loop: Tech Imaginaries and Patient Labor in Type 1 Diabetes Care

  Klara-Aylin Wenten: Feeling Technology: How Emotion AI Rewrites Bodies, Emotions and Genders

   

   
• 11. Tinkering Revisited: Digitalization and Agency in the Healthcare Sector of the Future

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Maren Heibges, Markus A. Feufel, Christine Schmid

  Presentations:

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 3  | Room 2-0-1

  Amina Alaoui Soulimani: When the machines can’t speak, human voices intervene

  Maidul Alam Chaklader: Rethinking “Tinkering”: Digitalization, Ambiguities, and Elder Care Arrangements in Contemporary Urban Bangladesh.

  Zuzanna Marciniak-Nuqui: Tinkering and Friction: Technology-Enabled Remote Monitoring for Patients with COPD in the English NHS
• 15. The platformization of medicine? Digital diagnostics, advanced therapies, and drug repurposing

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Sarah Wadmann. Anna Brückner Johansen, Tineke Kleinhout-Vliek, Laura Emdal Navne

  Presentations:

  Wednesday, September 17, 2025 | Slot 1  | Room 4-0-2

  Claire Beaudevin: Crafting customized centralization: platformization of genomics in rare diseases in France

  Anna Brueckner Johansen: Platformization of payment? Curating value in gene therapy

  Michael Morrison: Adaptive manufacturing: Initial thoughts on an emerging manufacturing platform for personalised medicine

  Mette N. Svendsen: Wayward platformization: genomes as doppelgangers in transnational relations

   

   
• 25. From Welfare to Watchful Care: Digital Surveillance and State-Citizen Relations

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Laura Louise Heinsen, Nete Schwennesen, Mikkel Kenni Bruun

  Abstract: Digital surveillance technologies (DSTs) are increasingly embedded in infrastructures and delivery mechanisms of welfare state care services across the Global North. DSTs have catalyzed both optimism and skepticism, and their moral implications and entangled relationship with practices of care have been discussed in the public and among researchers. This panel seeks to critically explore new empirical and conceptual avenues for the societal transformations prompted by DSTs, shedding light on their role in reconfiguring the dynamic relationships between welfare states, care practices, and citizens. Existing critical analyses of DSTs often operate within technological or social determinist frameworks, portraying DSTs as neutral tools for optimizing welfare care, instruments of panoptic control, or mechanisms for the commodification of data within capitalist economies. While such perspectives offer important critiques, they may obscure the nuanced and relational dynamics at play in the integration of DSTs into care practices. This panel invites theoretical and empirical contributions that adopt a relational ontology, foregrounding the co-constitutive agency of human and non-human actors without presupposing transformative capabilities as inherently tied to specific entities. We are particularly interested in situated accounts that illuminate how DSTs work—and are made to work—as emergent assemblages and socio-technical accomplishments within healthcare and care provision. We encourage reflections on the methodological contributions of anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) in unpacking the situated effects of DSTs. Contributions may focus on the development, implementation, or use of DSTs within diverse healthcare and care sectors, such as prenatal care, family care, hospital care, and eldercare.
• 30. Health as ecology: promises of health and well-being in biotechnological approaches across humans and more-than-humans

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Victor Secco, Charlotte Brives

  Abstract: Contemporary biotechnologies like metagenomics and phage therapy and turn-of-the century paradigm shifts like postgenomics and One/Planetary Health are pushing medicine beyond single-pathogen models toward more ecological approaches to health and disease. While biomedicine has historically focused on identifying and eliminating individual pathogens, new technological capabilities are revealing the complex relationships between humans and environments. This panel aims to explore how these biotechnological approaches are reshaping fundamental concepts of health and well-being in biomedicine while raising critical questions about access, normativity, and the promises of merging human and environmental health in times of computation and control.

  We invite papers examining how emerging technologies reconfigure human and more-than-human health in the biosciences in dealing with health and disease as ecological relations. Topics might include:

  • how genomic sequencing and computational analysis reframe understandings of ecologies and what it means to the health of humans and more-than-humans;
  • how artificial intelligence and big data reshape human ability to comprehend and intervene in complex biological systems and (re)define One/Planetary Health;
  • how approaches based on ecological relations, such as rewilding, phage therapy and bioremediation navigate more-than-human/microbial adaptability and normative conceptions of cure and health.

  We are interested in ethnographic investigations of how these technologies operate in practice, their promises and limitations, and their differentiated effects on communities, bodies, and environments. The panel aims to understand how technological engagements with ecological complexity are redefining concepts of health, disease, and therapeutic intervention, while critically examining questions of access and equity in these emerging biotechnological landscapes.
• 38. The Politics and Epistemologies of Collaboration: Inter/Transdisciplinarity as Method in Techno-Human Data Assemblages

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Lisa Lehner, Roberta Raffaetà

  Abstract: Work in medical anthropology increasingly takes place within the context and frameworks of third-party funded projects and inter- or transdisciplinary collaboration—especially researching the entanglements of technologies and (non)humans. This raises the question what an anthropological approach is, how its knowledges are produced and contribute, where its boundaries lie—with other social sciences like STS or with life/medical sciences, policymaking, activism—and which boundaries it can(not) or should (not) transgress. At the same time, academic institutions and funding agencies are among the strictest conservators of disciplinary bounds despite prevailing rhetoric praising interdisciplinarity’s value. 

  In this panel, we propose to open a discussion on the boundaries, possibilities, and underlying epistemologies of medical anthropology, its approaches, and the data it produces within the context of inter/transdisciplinary research in techno-human assemblages. We seek research, ethnographies, reflections, experiential accounts, or similar in different multi-media formats on and beyond the following questions:

  • How might we think and do inter-/transdisciplinarity as method(s) from an anthropological perspective?
  • What conflicts or practices inhere in different data epistemologies; what might be their transgressive potential?
  • What can we learn from politics and epistemologies of collaboration in which so many of us are entangled?
  • How are the boundaries of medical anthropology (re)made and transgressed in collaborative research and/or vis-à-vis other scholarly approaches to science and technology?
  • What is the role of medical anthropologists, especially in light of democratic backsliding, economic recessions, and techno-capitalist ruination?

  We welcome contributions from researchers at all career stages in and outside of the academy.
• 46. Sociality with/through AI in Health and Medicine: Current Figurations, Imagined Futures

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Bernhard Hadolt

  Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into health and medicine has the potential to fundamentally reshape the way how sociality is constituted, experienced, and imagined. AI systems — whether as diagnostic tools, virtual caregivers, or administrative agents — transform interactions between patients, healthcare professionals, objects, as well as institutions. At the same time, these technologies are claimed to carry both promises and perils for the futures of health and well-being, reflecting a “colonization of the future” that is shaped by, among other things, power relations that predefine whose voices are legitimized and recognized, by socioeconomic inequalities, as well as by postcolonial histories of biomedical knowledge production.

  This panel critically examines the ethical, sociocultural, political, and material-practical stakes of imagining AI-driven current transformations and futures in medicine. Whose voices and perspectives are represented in these imaginaries, and whose are excluded? How do AI systems mediate people’s relationships with their selves and their bodies, (social) environments, and institutions in ways that reproduce or challenge global inequalities? Moreover, the panel explores how anthropologists may critically engage in shaping the futures of AI in health and medicine, working alongside technology developers, policy makers, and affected communities to envision alternative, more equitable futures.

  Drawing on ethnographic and theoretical insights, this panel seeks to illuminate how AI-technologies reconfigure notions of care, trust, and authority while stimulating discussions about how anthropological practice can critically and collaboratively engage with other stakeholders to address power dynamics and advance equity-oriented transformations in health and medicine.
• 48. Epistemological bounds of medical technologies: Iatrogenic effects and new conceptions of health

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Alexandra Jønsson

  Abstract: The rapid advancement of medical technologies cultivates redemptive promises of cure, shaping patient expectations while simultaneously sparking debates about how healthy bodies are produced, validated, and practiced. Cutting-edge innovations not only inspire hope but also redefine conceptions of the self and its pathologies: In well-resourced healthcare systems, individuals increasingly put technologies at use for identifying underlying and unknown disease, even before it develops. While such technologies offer benefits to some, they also introduce unintended and iatrogenic consequences, including overdiagnosis, medical overuse, ableism and new forms of health inequities. The unintended consequences of healthcare interventions challenge the dominant narratives of biomedicine, exposing the epistemological limitations of medical technologies and practices. How is too much and too little intervention balanced? How do technologies entangle with bodies and emotions, and do technologies reproduce racial discriminations and produce new inequities? This panel underscores the need for medical anthropology to critically situate these technologies—and the epistemic errors they may generate (Bateson, 1972)—within the broader institutional, cultural, and societal structures, as well as the individual circumstances, that shape notions of health and well-being. We invites contributions that critically examine iatrogenic effects of health technologies as they become integrated into the everyday logics of illness and health, analyzing the dynamics that shape our understanding of these concepts. From overdiagnosis and prenatal diagnostics to cancer care pathways and expanding psychiatric nomenclature, we seek critical perspectives that interrogate the broader social, institutional, and structural forces shaping medical practices and their diverse effects on individuals and communities.

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• R04. Weight loss on prescription: New drugs, new moral challenges, and new types of weight stigma?

  Abstract

  Conveners: Pernille Andreassen, Fernanda Scagliusi, Alexandra Brewis

  Abstract: The roll-out of GLP-1 (”anti-obesity”) drugs is predicted to transform health care profoundly.  Prescriber and public enthusiasm – including for ”off label” use -- has been overwhelming.  Citizens of many higher income countries are struggling with supply chain shortages and denied insurance coverage. The extremely high price of drugs within this complicated medical and pharmaceutical landscape also makes it difficult or impossible to obtain for many with lower incomes. There is also the challenge of side effects and a lack of clear data and medical guidelines for how to manage longer-term use.  

  There is no corpus of social science studies on how people experience, use, and relate to these new weight loss drugs, but our collective research is confirming the lengths people are willing to go to gain and sustain their access to GLP-1 medication despite these profound challenges. This includes accepting financial burdens, enduring unpleasant side effects, experimenting with treatment regimes, access via pop-up online compounding pharmacies or the black market, and significant stress/distress. This is compounded for users by the powerful moralizing stigma around high body weight itself and the notion that they are ”cheating” at weight loss.

  In this roundtable, we share observations from our emergent ethnographic studies on these newer weight loss medications that build on our long-term research programs around weight in the USA, Japan, Brazil and Denmark.  We will compare and reflect on how weight loss drugs are prescribed, dispensed, used, and experienced in a broader ethical, medical and cultural context.  

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• 2. Engaging Plurality, Negotiating Diversity: Sowa Rigpa Practices and Perspectives in/on a Changing World

  Abstract

  Conveners: Stephan Kloos, Barbara Gerke

  Presentations:

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 3 & 4 | Room 4-0-3

  Dara Bramson: Braiding Knowledges: Ethnographic Case Studies of Sowa Rigpa in Exile

  Barbara Gerke: Negotiating Legitimacy and Healing: Plural Landscapes of Sowa Rigpa and Governance during the COVID-19 Pandemic in India and Bhutan

  Stephan Kloos: Rethinking Participant Observation: An Exile Perspective on Tibetan Medicine

  Patricia Mundelius: A Paradoxical Kind of Suffering: Negotiating Emotional Care within Sowa Rigpa Consultations in Europe

  Kei Nagaoka: Herbs, Senses, and Sowa Rigpa: An Ethnographic Study of the Embodied Experience of Herbal Medicine in Arunachal Pradesh, the Eastern Himalayas

  Elizabeth Turk: Searching for the ‘root cause’ of illness and moral aetiology in Mongolian health settings

  Stacey Van Vleet: Bonesetting between Tibetan scholarly medicine and Mongolian "common knowledge"

  Isabella Würthner: The Female Reproductive System And The Role Of Gender-Specific Infectious Diseases In The Tibetan World
• 7. Addiction in New Cultural and Class Contexts

  Abstract

  Conveners: Joseph Tulasiewicz, Bhrigupati Singh, Alastair Parsons

  Presentations:

  Wednesday, September 17, 2025 | Slot 4  | Room 2-0-1

  Armaan Mullick Alkazi: Stuck between mahols (atmospheres) : binge drinking on the street in Delhi.    

  Lucy Clarke: "Don't worry about the God stuff": How secularity shapes recovery in London's Twelve Step Fellowships

  Raffik Poole: Dependence in Recovery: Healing Suicidal Ideation with Ketamine.

  Glikery Ulunov: Misuse as Adaptation and the Breakdown of Adaptation: Control and its Limits in Russian Gabapentinoid Use

   

   
• 12. More-than-human health: challenging anthropocentric paradigms through post-humanist, ecofeminist, indigenous and decolonial perspectives

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Daniela Calvo, Sabina Vassileva

  Presentations:

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 1 & 2  | Room 4-0-4

  Verónica Calvo Valenzuela: The Where to land? workshops: A therapeutic space at the crossroads of ritual and pragmatic exercises.

  Daniela Calvo: Towards a reconceptualization of relational health: Health and more-than-human entanglements in Candomblé

  Jui-Hsin Cheng: “Green Vitality” from Germany to Taiwan: Exploring the cross-cultural transplantation of naturopathy and healing practices

  Claudia Lang: Coastal distress: The biomorality of ecological loss in Kerala, India

  Daniel Münster: Soils, carbon, and microbes. Biochar and the limits of more-than-human health

  Aparna Raghu Menon: Listen Louder: Decolonizing Autistic Non-Vernal Communication via Posthumanist Thought

  Piera Talin: Otherwise ontologies in ayahuasca ritual experience: plants, spirits, and healing. 

  Natalia Tolsty: Multiple Dimensions of Body Image and Human Agency among Indigenous Communities in Los Altos de Chiapas, Mexico
• 16. African perspectives on health and wellbeing

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Ellen Forsman Larsson

  Presentations:

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 3  | Room 4-0-4

  Peter Hoesing: “The Things of Culture”: What the Durability of African Traditional Medicine Means for Postmodern Medical Anthropology

  Geoffrey Nwaka: Towards Decolonizing Medicine and Healthcare: The Place of African Health and Healing Traditions 

  Marta Scaglioni: Beyond Extraction: Centering Tunisian Perspectives in Microbiome Research

  Zelealem Leyew Temesgen: The perceptions and expressions of death among the Amhara people of Ethiopia
• 20. Interrogating Medical Pluralism in Global Health: Navigating Diverse Forms of Healing and Caring in the Contemporary Healthcare Framework

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Daniele Mario Buonomo, Xu Liu, Matteo Valoncini

  Abstract: Today, different forms of healing and caring are increasingly contaminating each other, facing the emerging challenges from epidemiological and healthcare system crises that have revealed the inability of Western biomedicine to generalise the frameworks of healthcare provision. This situation witnesses the significantly increasing proportion of traditional and/or new methods of care and healing in patients’ choices. In this context, we acknowledge that the distinction of healthcare concepts between the Global North and the Global South has formed an expanding ground of pluralism. Since 2002, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has underlined the importance of taking into account all different forms of care for a global view of caring and healing. The WHO highlighted the role of “traditional”, “complementary”, “integrative” and “alternative” medicines in developing “a global strategy to foster its appropriate integration, regulation and supervision” (WHO, 2013, p. 7). The consecutive introduction of relevant policies (WHO, 2002; WHO, 2013; WHO, 2024) further revealed the necessity of plural perspectives to perceive and practise healing and caring at both macro and micro levels. 

  In this panel, we invite empirical and theoretical contributions that reflect on how plural perspectives can facilitate a better understanding of the global health context. We hope to push the thoughts based on, but not limited to the following questions: What systems of care corroborate to define and carry out medical pluralism in different contexts of healthcare today? How can this contribute to more profound improvement of the Global Health framework? 
• 29. Perception through Interaction/Interaction through Perception

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Michele Friedner, Cordelia Erikson-Davis

   

  Abstract: Anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers have argued that perception arises through interaction (Gibson 1979; Varela, Thompson & Rosch E, 1991, Corwin & Erickson-Davis 2020). This work has established that experience is not merely a matter of perceiving something “out there” and bringing it “in here” but rather, is itself intra-action (Barad 2006; Corwin & Erickson-Davis 2020). In this double panel, scholars working in a range of sites from the clinic to the home to sites of leisure will explore how sensory perception as interaction emerges in practice including: how play can open up the possibility for co-presence; how both the mystical and erotic trouble the boundary between the self and other; how brain machine interface devices reveal perception as a constitutive process that spans the individual and milieu; how the "natural" comes to be constituted through embodiment; and how touch produces presence, among other phenomena. This double panel will explore how approaching perception and presence as interactionally emergent affords the examination of embodiments, experiences, and engagements that are often analytically imperceptible or dismissed.

  Presenters are: Michele Friedner (University of Chicago), Susanna Trnka (University of Auckland), Cordelia Erikson-Davis (Stanford University), Sina Schuttler (University of Oslo), Helma Korzybska (Paris Nanterre University), Anna Corwin (California Institute for Integral Studies), Kathleen Rice (McGill Unversity)

  All presenters have confirmed that they will be able to attend in person.

  We are requesting a double panel with the discussion session to be at the end of the second panel.

  Please let us know if you need individual abstracts!
• 31. Challenging dominant medico-political models through sensory ecologies of health

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Josephine Biglin, Kristina Baines, Elisabeth Hsu

  Abstract: The study of ‘sensory ecologies’ implicates the body and its immediate environment in a way that allows us to account for health and wellbeing beyond biomedical measures and representations of health and the neoliberal commodification of wellbeing as an individualised state that can be acquired or achieved. Through a focus on practices that bring to the fore often non-verbalised sensory experiences and [‘new] materialities’, where therapeutic space is created through intercorporeal practices, it becomes possible to think about forms of resistance – for one, to dominant ways of knowing and understanding how health might be defined, and two, to ways of disrupting socio-political positioning. For example, Biglin's work sheds light on the way in which asylum seekers and refugees wellbeing practices resist enforced marginality and the affective technologies of power that the state employs. Baines' work with indigenous Belizean communities identifies relationships between everyday traditional heritage practices and health that maintain wellbeing through times of change (spatial, temporal, political climate), and Hsu's research on the temporalities that fermentation of local food in remote areas requires, highlight carving out spaces where wellbeing is engendered through sensory and embodied experience, place and materiality. Wellbeing, in this context is understood as an affective state in constant flux, rather than a life state. Framing the analysis of wellbeing in terms of sensory ecologies, allows the speakers to go beyond representationalism in ways that include negotiations of space, place, affect and texture that resist the dominant medico-political models of constructing and thinking about health.

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• 6. FRICTIONS IN HEALTHCARE ETHNOGRAPHY AS A MOTOR FOR IMPROVEMENT

  Abstract

  Conveners: Giulia Sinatti, Jennifer Creese, Julie Salvador

  Presentations:

  Wednesday, September 17, 2025 | Slot 3  | Room 2-0-3

  Madalina Alama:  “Is this true… what I heard? Five hundred dollars for an interview?”

  Jesse Bia: Inducing Success: Navigating the Frictions of a Biomedical Scandal

  Eliška Bydžovská: Friction and Positionality in Palliative Care: A Nurse-Researcher's Perspective

  Michelle Parsons: Misalignments in research on a defunded global health project in Kabul, Afghanistan
• 10. Exploring healthcare and research as creative practices

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Annekatrin Skeide, Jeannette Pols

  Presentations:

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 1 & 2  | Room 4-0-5

  Sandra Baernreuther: Ghosts of Digitalization: Storying India’s Digital Health Transformation

  Tanja Bukovčan: Foregrounding Creativity in Later-Life Sexuality: Rethinking Health, Aging, and the Good Life

  Rebecka Fleetwood-smith: Hospital Reimagined: Using an artwork to explore the dynamic hospital environment

  Claire Harris: Situating care and creative practice in research 

  Ella Hillström: A Praxis of the Tentacular Face: A Somatic Essay 

  Martin Høybye: “Like being invited into another”: A film about co-creative movement in cancer rehabilitation

  Mizuki Igata: Uncertain Scripts: Exploring Theatre Practice as Care in Mental Health

  Taylor Riley: “Not terribly arty”: Some complexities of using photovoice in biosocial ethnographic research
• 13. Multi-perspectival ethnography in medical anthropology

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Kiara Wickremasinghe, David Mosse 

  Presentations:

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 3 & 4  | Room 4-0-5

  Neda Deneva: Making Pain Personal: Embodied Relationships and Reflexive Multiplicity in Collaborative Research

  Heidi Fjeld: What Collaborations, With Whom and How?  The Ethics and Ends of Ethnographic Fieldwork with Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China

  Anne-Sophie Guernon: Letting Their Voices Shine: Creating Space for Different Perspectives in Multi-Sited Hospital Ethnography

  Janette Lindroos: Gaining, Holding, and Sharing Knowledge in Ethnographies of Doubtful Pediatric Conditions 

  Irene Maffi: On the collaboration between anthropologists and ethnopsychiatrists: two experiences in France and in Italy

  Sandra Staudacher: Navigating Multi-Perspectival Participation: Ethnographic Insights from the Swiss Long-Term Care Sector

  Eva Steinberger: Navigating multi-perspectival collaboration: Reflections from a Nigerian-German anthropological tandem in a transdisciplinary One Health project

  Susan Whyte: Covid 19 in Uganda: Multiple perspectives on uncontrolled youth and life course interruptions 
• 23. Doing Care: pedagogy, methodology, fieldwork

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Arushi Sahay, Alankrita Anand

  Abstract: Care has a rich and burgeoning conceptual landscape in medical anthropology: from the gendered forms of care-giving, care-seeking and care-work, care as affect and desire, as control and surveillance, to the emergent role of care in studying mental health, ageing, disability, and human-animal relations. And yet, we lack a robust understanding of the diverse and intersectional ways of doing care in anthropological teaching and research practices. In light of this, our panel aims to (re)evaluate the methodological underpinnings of care such that it can be incisively foregrounded and mobilised in doing medical anthropology. 

  How can we cultivate care in our pedagogical and research relations? How can we reconfigure and reframe existing teaching and methodological toolkits to centre care in our overall research praxis? How can our research questions themselves invoke care? How can we care for ourselves, and for our interlocutors and research participants? How can doing care challenge conventional research hierarchies and colonial modes of knowledge production, especially in redefining dominant understandings of health and well-being? 

  We invite participants from across disciplinary backgrounds (anthropology and sociology, science and technology studies, gender and feminist studies, global health) to critically and empirically unpack the notion of doing care across the following sub-themes:

  1. Pedagogy: syllabus and curriculum; institutional practices and relations; academic supervision and labour
  2. Research design: framing research questions; identifying data collection strategies and analytical approaches; dissemination of findings
  3. Fieldwork: access and rapport-building; hierarchies and power relations; anonymity and confidentiality; intimacy and sensitivity; reciprocity; long-term and collaborative relationships
• 34. Organizing Care as a research practice: Imaginative approaches

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Sabya Van Elswijk, Matouš Jelínek

  Abstract: Care is both a practical and theoretical matter. Practically, as Annemarie Mol suggests, someone must organize it, ensuring people and resources are in the right places to meet care needs. Theoretically, care involves understanding the underlying ideas, determining what constitutes right or wrong care, and its goals. Care policies and practice are often seen as dichotomous entities, but we propose viewing organization as a process that bridges theory and practice, making them adapt to each other. Inspired by Jeannette Pols work on "hanging out" and generative research as relational, participatory methods, there is a search for approaches that dismantle hierarchies, amplify marginalized voices, and co-produce situated knowledge.

  This session invites papers on the organizational aspects of long-term care, focusing on imaginative methodologies and critiquing the dichotomy between practice and policy. We welcome research that explores methodologically:

  • How care professionals organize care both theoretically and practically, and strategies to align policies with practice.
  • How practice and policies influence each other.
  • Organizational differences at various levels—managers, care workers, and middle persons—and their approaches.
  • Organizational hierarchies and structures within care institutions, their impact on care practice, and vice versa.
  • Necessary methodological innovations and novel approaches in social science for researching care organization. 

  We seek contributions that share novel and imaginative approaches to fieldwork on care as a matter of organization, aiming to dismantle the dichotomy between practice – policy and push disciplinary boundaries. 
• 43. Co-produced Intersectional Justice and Trauma-informed ethnographic research methodologies: emancipation and inclusion possibilities and co-optation risks 

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Carolina Borda, Xandra Miguel Lorenzo

  Abstract: In health research, ‘co-producing research’ involves people with lived experience in formulating research aims, objectives, data collection, analysis, and publication. This approach is similar to ‘co-producing health services,’ where service users design and deliver services in partnership with professionals (Boyle & Harris 2009:3). A main critique of co-production is tokenism, where involvement is superficial rather than meaningful. It differs from ‘user-led research,’ particularly in mental health, where service users and survivors develop research topics, decide on approaches, and conduct the research themselves (Faulkner & Nicholls, 2001:32).

  This panel invites papers exploring the critical and emancipatory possibilities of ethnographic methodologies that enable user-led and co-produced research. Such research should be intersectional, considering multiple forms of discrimination, gender-sensitive, trauma-informed, collaborative, reciprocal, non-hierarchical, ethical, and inclusive of various learning needs and mediums of expression, such as photo voices, audios, artwork, and written material. Additionally, it examines the limits and risks of co-option, where the non-hierarchical, de-colonial, activist, transformative, and healing potential of co-production might be compromised.

  The panel seeks insights into anthropologists’ journeys in innovating research methodologies to enhance opportunities for research led by interlocutors. Contributions are invited on topics including the negotiation between research expert and facilitator roles, creation and adaptation of methodological tools, exploration of co-researchers' positionalities, empowerment, and power imbalances. It also looks at the impact on data analysis and theory development, the preparedness of institutional, funding, and grassroots structures, and reflections on failed projects that aimed to “give voice” to underrepresented groups but risked co-optation.
• 44. The Politics of Health Care: Exploring Methodological Approaches to Exclusive Rationalities and Practices in Healthcare Systems

  Abstracts

  Conveners: Sabine Hess, Reza Bayat, Marie Fröhlich

  Abstract: Although Western democratic states affirmatively declare a right-to-health policy, the health-related developments of recent years have repeatedly shown that access to comprehensive health care is highly stratified along axes of race, nationality, residence and insurance status, class, and gender. The discursive exclusions of undesired bodies and their specific health needs on political and epistemological levels result in their being largely overlooked in general processes of policy making and medical and health-related knowledge production. For marginalized groups, health care systems function as additional social, cultural, economic, and political exclusive and/or bordering mechanisms. Beyond the concrete provision of care, this shifts the focus to the structural dimensions of health care and, consequently, to the underlying political and institutional conditions of health care systems.

  This raises two fundamental methodological concerns: First, it demonstrates the need to critically examine the design and inherent rationalities of health care systems and institutions and the various means through which they shape the production of health care for marginalized populations. Secondly, it calls on us to examine how ethnographic and critical engagement with borders, bodies, and health can foster more reflexive, interdisciplinary, and equitable practices.

  Against this backdrop, this panel aims to explore innovative methodological approaches that enable qualitative research into these complex fields, considering the conditions of social inequality and/or migration policy. It invites analytically and ethnographically grounded contributions, as well as comparative perspectives, that focus on the structural and institutional dimensions of health care systems to foster an interdisciplinary and robust understanding of methodological approache.

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• R01. Material Certainties: Critical Reflections on the Future of Ethnographic Research in Disease and Pain

  Abstract

  Conveners: Jose Manuel Allard Serrano, Sofia Ceresuela Del Valle, Rodrigo Diaz-Canio

  Abstract: Phenomena such as the pandemic, climate change, political conflicts, and the economic crisis are forcing us to rethink our life models, challenging the practices and relationships that have shaped our socio-cultural structures. In response, anthropology calls for interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond conventional methods to drive meaningful change. To do this, we must engage with the contested politics of an uncertain world. The intersection of design and anthropology emerges as a key ally in this process. Medical anthropology offers critical insights into how societies manage suffering and pain, especially in terminal illness, and provides perspectives on how we can reimagine these experiences more inclusively and compassionately. This collaboration has the potential to create new environments, tools, and solutions that transform care, positioning design as essential in managing pain and suffering.

  This roundtable invites ethnographers to reflect on the various materialities in the field that help cope with the illness and pain. In particular, we will explore how medical teams, patients and their support circle, in precarious environments, ingeniously manage to cope with the pain and emerging imaginaries of the failures, inequalities, and discriminations inherent in healthcare systems. We want to think about the future of ethnographic practice in disease and pain research, exploring how emerging materialities in palliative care can become self-managed certainties. We aim to discuss how these materialities challenge the limitations of biomedical models and offer opportunities to speculate on materiality as a certainty capable of exposing current limitations and imagining less painful futures.
• R06. Structural Competency: Tracing the Influence of Social Structures in Health as a Research and Teaching Agenda

  Abstract

  Conveners: Mirko Pasquini, Margret Jäger

  Abstract: A defining ethical, legal, and social dilemma of our time is the tension between the rapid pace of innovative treatments and technologies in medicine on the one hand, and persistent health inequities, with millions of deaths each year from easily preventable and treatable diseases, on the other. These inequities stem from centuries of colonialism, extractive regimes, and unequal distribution of resources. 

  The COVID-19 pandemic has once again raised awareness of social and health inequalities and the need for medicine to respond. Despite this increased awareness, terms such as "narrative medicine" and "holistic medical practice" have been associated with few concrete tools for engaging with these forces (Stonington et al. 2018).

  "Structural competency" is a recent research framework that expands clinical medicine and traditional public health sciences at their intersections with the social sciences to provide tools for professionals to address the upstream causes of social and health disparities (Metzl & Hansen, 2014). 

  Drawing from the critical knowledge produced by medical anthropology, this new framework has led to new programs, practices and terms utilized to conceptualize and act on social inequalities in medical care around the world. 

  The roundtable will discuss the different global perspectives within medical anthropology in relation to structural competency as a research and teaching agenda. 

  By analyzing practical cases of application of structural competency to multiple global scenarios, the roundtable will explore the advantages and the limitations of structural competency as an interdisciplinary effort to approach the social, ethical, political, and legal aspects of health formation.
• R07. Doing Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene

  Abstract

  Conveners: Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata

  Abstract: Environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and the climate crisis raise new questions and challenges for medical anthropology as the subfield re-orientates to address individual, collective, and planetary temporal and spatial scales, ongoing predatory capitalism and colonial legacies of extractivism, as well as human and non human entanglements in ‘Anthropocene health’ (Montesi et al 2023; Segata et al 2023).  The controversial rejection of the Anthropocene as ‘epoch’ (AWG, 2023) and pivot towards Anthropocene as ‘event’ provides an unmissable opportunity to reflect further on the limits of universalising categorizations and to revalue situated anthropological knowledge, research and teaching orientated to questions of health and wellbeing in the Anthropocene.

  This panel builds on our collaboration between medical anthropologists at UCL, CIESAS in Mexico, and UFRGS in Brazil involved in producing a multi-lingual and open access ‘Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene’ teaching tool, launched in Autumn 2024. The process of critical reflection in curating and aligning decolonial knowledges and questions of justice and equity  has made us acutely aware of the challenges of doing medical anthropology in the Anthropocene. This is especially as we reflect on next steps in our collaboration, including focusing on global food systems and expanding our interdisciplinary dialogue with indigenous science and scientists from the global South. We invite contributors to join our roundtable conversation in reflecting on these challenges and opportunities for medical anthropology to articulate and reimagine what health might be in the Anthropocene.
• R08. Applied Medical Anthropology in Times of Crisis

  Abstract

  Conveners: Silvia Wojczewski, Viktoria Adler, Anna Christina Maukner, Ruth Kutalek

  Abstract: Anthropological expertise is particularly valuable when working in transcultural contexts and with people in vulnerable situations. Working with people on the ground and making sense of their lived experiences can be of great benefit in the context of crisis management. With the current rise of anti-feminist, far-right, anti-social justice and anti-immigrant governments around the world, it is increasingly important for anthropologists to engage with diverse fields within and beyond academia. Yet there is often a gap between theory and practice when working in crisis contexts: what should be done in theory often has to be compromised when faced with the challenges of reality. Anthropologists often have to juggle rigid (safety and ethical) regulations, institutional practices and the priorities of the communities they work with. In this roundtable we would like to invite anthropologists working in applied medical, humanitarian, governmental, non-governmental or disaster management fields and in different geographical contexts to discuss the challenges they face in applying anthropology in different crisis contexts. How do they use their knowledge as anthropologists to understand, resist and act in crises? How are they able to apply theoretical and methodological knowledge in their respective fields? What are the main challenges or ethical dilemmas they face when engaging in crisis management? How are they able to translate their practical expertise back into research and policy? These and other questions will be discussed with the panelists and the audience. 
• R09. Crossing Boundaries between Medical Anthropology and Biomedicine (AGEM Roundtable)

  Abstract

  Conveners: Ehler Voss, Márcio Vilar, Stefan Reinsch

  Abstract: For fifty-five years, the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM) has been mediating between medical anthropology and medical practice by addressing the multiplicity of definitions and understandings of health. In this roundtable, we will examine the current status and challenges in research and health care, particularly with regard to the relevance of teaching medical anthropology in contemporary biomedical institutions, along the following questions:  • Could exchanges between medical anthropology and biomedicine contribute to overcoming boundaries between the life and social sciences, or is it pertinent to insist on preserving an epistemic agonism between the fields in order to make the differences between them productive?

  • How can current challenges in daily practice be addressed by drawing on anthropology in the process of socialisation and professional identity formation of physicians and allied health professionals, and how can this be done and improved?
  • What are the specific contributions of medical anthropology in comparison to other disciplines, e.g. in relation to psychology, psychiatry, sociology?

  We propose to discuss these questions in relation to pressing issues such as: migration, racism, translation, solidarity, and other intersectional concerns. Furthermore, we examine the role of situated biology, diagnostic frictions, and various conceptualizations of the body. 

  The participants will discuss examples of (un)successful interactions in teaching and practice based on their practical experiences and research.

  Participants include anthropologists, clinical physicians, and psychologists working at the intersections of anthropology and medicine in medical schools and research institutes. Confirmed: Ulrike Kluge, Christine Holmberg, Jörg Niewöhner, Seth Holmes, Stefan Reinsch
• R12. Closing the distance? Medical anthropology between (health) activism and academia

  Abstract

  Conveners: Sara Gerotto, Lucia Mair

  Abstract: Over the last few years, multiple crises, from political upheavals to the global pandemic, have fragmented welfare states and healthcare systems already struggling to provide care. These crises exposed and worsened structural weaknesses, and shed light on inequalities that disadvantage access to, and the experience of, care for women, asylum seekers, queer people, people with disabilities, and people living in underserved communities, among others.  

  In response, health activist initiatives and grassroots collectives have (re-)emerged to contest this exacerbation, involving healthcare professionals, social workers, caregivers, patient advocates and their allies. 

  Social scientists have meanwhile shown growing interest in these actors and increasingly question the social, political and ethical complexities of these attempts to instigate change.

  This roundtable explores anthropological engagements with such health activism and their complex relations with the academic world. Specifically, we want to critically discuss the methodological, ethical, and epistemological tensions that arise when medical anthropology becomes more involved and applied, for example: what possibilities or limitations are opened by involving ethnographers in rethinking health and health systems? How do medical anthropologists negotiate analytical distance and watchful attention with their engagement in health movements, often sharing a commitment to their interlocutors’ goals? How does epistemic authority shift when researchers get involved in bottom-up initiatives? What shifts in research methodologies are these processes driving? How does researchers' personal experience in health matters impact research and activism?

  We welcome contributions discussing practical experiences of engaging as an anthropologist in these contexts, by pushing disciplinary boundaries and suggesting new pathways.
• R14. How do hospitals (continue) to matter to anthropologists?

  Abstract

  Conveners: Fanny Chabrol, Amina Soulimani

  Abstract: Our current geopolitical moment exacerbates hospitals as condensing socio-economic disparities, emotional distress and environmental destructions. As much as hospitals are greatly destabilised by budgetary austerity worldwide, and are targeted in conflicts as dramatically shown in the Israeli war on Gaza, they still matter as a key locations for medical care.

  Anthropologists have long made hospitals one of their favourite field sites, investigating their medical cultures, the assemblage of biomedical technologies and health professionals, within specific political economies and global health (Livingston 2012; Street 2014). Hospitals continue to be intriguing in their multiple instantiations (Chabrol et Kehr 2020) particularly in regards to calls and movements for radical care and radical health with the need to think plasticity of hospital environments, and their non normative qualities of a “queer hospital”(Dalton 2024). Recent projects challenging the “hospital of the future” or the future of hospitals across continents opens plural pathways towards more radical epistemologies and methods to approach care and medicine otherwise (Street 2018; Kehr 2020).

  We will invite scholars present at the conference as well as health professionals and other actors to reflect on novel collaborations and conceptualisations.

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• Emerging perspectives: Master’s students panel on critical engagements in medical anthropology

  Abstract

  Conveners: Andreas Krauskopf, Paula Pospichal, Agnes Köchl

  Abstract: This panel welcomes contributions from students who are working on or have recently finished their master’s theses in medical anthropology or related disciplines engaging with well-being and health. We are master’s students ourselves, currently researching topics such as the management and perception of chronic diseases (e.g., ME/CFS and thyroid diseases), power dynamics in healthcare, and differing perspectives on mental health in a migration context. Aiming to gather master’s students with related research interests, we invite contributions located within the following thematic fields: Power relations, gender and intersectionality, migrant/refugee health(care), chronicity, disability, health activism, mental health and psychotherapy/psychiatry, medical pluralism. Through the panel, these young scholars can share their research projects among each other as well as with scholars on a more advanced level. The panel hopes to provide them with the unique opportunity to get in contact with and receive valuable feedback from differently positioned experts in the sub-discipline or related fields. At the same time, it supports them in creating and fostering networks with other master´s students with similar research interests at universities across Europe. The panel's convenors share the observation that the current global situation necessitates redefinitions of health, healing and well-being in multiple ways. By creating a safe(r) space particularly reserved for master´s students to present their work-in-progress or thesis findings, the panel simultaneously fosters the inclusion of potential future experts in debates about futures of health and well-being, and urges these aspiring scholars to critically engage with the search for such redefinitions in their work.

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• Labs

  Abstract

  Conveners: Ursula Probst

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 3 | Room 2-0-2

  Lab1. Cesar Enrique Giraldo Herrera, Ruth Anderwald, Stefan Schneider - Lab title: Sensory Engagements with Microbes, Interdisciplinary Explorations of Human-Microbe Relation Affordances

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 4 | Room 2-0-2

  Lab2. Hanne Bess Boelsbjerg, Dorte Bjerre Jensen - Rest as resistance - exploring restorative practice in overstimulating times

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 3 | Room 4-0-2

  Lab3. Kathryn Burns, Nuria Rossell, Jullia Challinor - Food as a Technology of Care: A Feminist Perspective on Nutrition, Well-being, and Health

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 3 | Room 2-0-2

  Lab4. Maurizia Mezza, PhD, University of Amsterdam, Shahana Siddiqui, PhD, University of Amsterdam - Stitching Meaning: Feminist Textures in Theory and Practice

  Wednesday, September 17, 2025 | Slot 4 | Room 4-0-4

  Lab5. Hannelore van Bavel, Vivien Lou

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 4 | Room 2-0-1

  Lab6. Oli Williams, Glenn Robert, Bertil Lindenfalk - Researching and Improving Health(care) Post-Participatory Turn: can Elinor Ostrom's principles for collaborative group working help?

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 2 | Room 2-0-2

  Lab7. Alice Street, Millie Marriott Webb - Deconstructing devices: A practical laboratory in medical plastic

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 2 | Room 4-0-3

  Lab8. Gianna Paniagua - Solving Communication Obstacles in Teen Support Groups: A Narrative Medicine Workshop

  Friday, September 19, 2025 | Slot 3 | Room 4-0-3

  Lab9. Anne-Sophie Reichert, Esther Vorwerk - In Our Own Measure: A FLINTA Workshop on Healing & Embodiment

  Thursday, September 18, 2025 | Slot 3 | Room 2-0-1

  Lab10. Ranjini Raghavendra - LAB: Health, Well-Being and Emerging Digital Technologies