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

  Conveners: Edwin Ambani Ameso, Azza Mustafa Babikir Ahmed

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  Abstract: Digital imaginaries have become a core component of health development agendas championing Universal Health Coverage, tackling communicable and non-communicable diseases, and strengthening healthcare systems. Moreover, these imaginaries in digital solutions are integral to actualizing health-related sustainable development goals as technoscientific developments. The salvatory visions are to cure health and economic inequalities, thereby helping citizens attain the highest standards of healthcare. Correspondingly, the past decade have been massive investments in the digitization of healthcare on a global scale. Nourishing widespread fantasies of infrastructural leapfrogging, policymakers and experts extol such techno-fixes as the panacea for economic and administrative problems. For all these reasons, the uptake of digital technologies such as drones, Internet of things, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning has turned into a political imperative. Nonetheless, little is known about how and in which ways these technologies change access to healthcare and health-related data use, management, storage and privacy on the ground. We invite anthropological papers exploring how digital imaginaries are redefining health services access, wherein global technologies fuse with local realities and historical legacies. Specifically, how these imaginaries compete, complement and attempt to leapfrog historical challenges while promising to provide health in unprecedented logistical challenges, labour and patients data concerns, and widespread lack of political commitment and de-investments in public healthcare systems.  Additionally, we aim to explore how digital imaginaries shape access to life-saving commodities and essential medicines. We invite papers that are ethnographically inclined to speak to the global rise of digital health imaginaries redefining health and well-being of citizens. 
• 2. Engaging Plurality, Negotiating Diversity: Sowa Rigpa Practices and Perspectives in/on a Changing World

  Conveners: Stephan Kloos, Barbara Gerke

  Stream: Plural Perspectives on Health and Healing

  Abstract: Over the past decade, Vienna has established itself as a global, vibrant hub for interdisciplinary medical anthropological research on Sowa Rigpa, encompassing Tibetan, Himalayan, and Mongolian traditions. This panel brings together – and into conversation with each other – scholars based in or connected to Vienna and their diverse Sowa Rigpa perspectives. We actively seek to expand this network internationally by inviting contributions from scholars and practitioners, drawing from anthropology, Tibetan studies, medical and social history, medical sociology, and related disciplines that explore or visually illustrate Sowa Rigpa pluralities. The panel aims to explore how Sowa Rigpa practices and perspectives operate dynamically in a rapidly changing world, shaping each other and intersecting with larger social ecologies, political economies, and multispecies environments. Starting from the premise that diversity – across practices, perspectives, scholarship, and medicine – is an asset and a strength, we ask how Sowa Rigpa pluralities are negotiated in both past and present. 

  Key questions include: How do Sowa Rigpa practices shape and are shaped by particular worldviews? What role do plural academic perspectives of scholarship on Sowa Rigpa play in our understandings of this medical tradition? How might the practices of scholarship and medicine be connected or even influence each other? By addressing these questions, this panel contributes to broader discourses on plurality, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue on the global manifestations and trends of Sowa Rigpa’s pluralistic landscapes of health and healing.
• 3. Confronting the Inevitable

  Conveners: Matthew Wolf-Meyer

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  Abstract: Medicine has long sought to intervene on inevitable physiological processes: amphetamines to delay sleep and soporifics to counteract wakefulness, anti-aging therapeutics and cosmetic surgery to slow or disguise aging, radiation to kill cancer cells, antivirals and antibiotics to kill the expanding populations of viruses and bacterial infections, renal therapeutics to prolong ailing kidneys, pharmaceuticals to tame irritable bowels and depressive brain chemistries, and on and on. Confronting the inevitable may be the obscured heart of contemporary medicine, which is being brought into relief as therapeutics fail to adequately stop or slow the physiological processes that harm or kill us as patients, citizens, and community members. What are we to do with medicine that is powerless against antibiotic resistant microbes?, that cannot eradicate rapidly mutating viruses?, that produces ongoing dependencies on pharmaceuticals and infrastructures that decay in their effectiveness over time? How might theorizing medicine’s powerlessness change how we understand what medicine is and does?
• 4. Intersecting Frontiers: Towards understanding intersections among climate change, culture, gender, and health in the Anthropocene

  Conveners: Sadiq Bhanbhro, Inayat Ali

  Stream: Health and Environment

  Abstract: Climate change causes extreme weather events that exacerbate health, food, and nutritional vulnerabilities worldwide, particularly in low-resource countries. These testing events make vulnerable populations, e.g., women, more vulnerable. Women, especially those who are pregnant or giving birth, disproportionately bear the consequences of climatic challenges, making maternal health a critical issue at the nexus of environmental, sociocultural, and economic factors. These vulnerabilities are not simply healthcare challenges but reflect deeper power imbalances, sociocultural norms, and systemic inequities.  

  The intersections between nature and culture become particularly significant when considering the ways gender dynamics, social class, and sociocultural patterns synergistically affect women's ability to access, use, and manage their health and well-being. These multifaceted challenges, such as inequities and climate change, raise pressing questions about how to address them effectively.  

  Despite global commitments to improve women's health through SDGs, progress remains insufficient in low-resource countries. Research that casts a critical light on the intersectional influences of climate change, sociocultural practices, and health needs to be discussed to inform impactful, community-driven interventions that enhance the health and well-being of vulnerable populations, especially women.

  This panel invites proposals that use qualitative, ethnographic and community-based methodologies to show the "syndemic" (Singer, 1994) or synergistic relationship among sociocultural practices, economic contexts, climate-related events and women's health outcomes. We invite contributions that enhance our understanding of women's vulnerabilities and sustainable solutions for their health and well-being. Our panel aims to foster discussions among researchers, practitioners, and community members to address the disproportionate impact on women's health.
• 5. Pioneering New Strategies for Promoting Medical Anthropology within Healthcare and Non-Healthcare Contexts of Resource-Limited Settings in Africa

  Conveners: Stephen Ombere, Agnettah Adiedo

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  Abstract: Medical anthropology (MA) training ‘fosters approach to social and structural health and wellbeing models in critically reflective, cross-cultural, people-centered and transdisciplinary ways.’ Yet healthcare professionals and educators in the Global South have not fully embraced it, especially in Africa. There is a need for context-specific strategies to build competencies in medical anthropology in resource-limited settings that bridge theoretical knowledge with practical application, promoting a synergistic approach between medical anthropologists in academic, healthcare settings and the community.  

  This panel explores the different models that may be considered to promote medical anthropological approaches in training healthcare and non-professionals in African settings. Medical training in Africa focusing on cultural humility and cultural competency is weak.  Medical anthropologists bring their expertise into healthcare through a case study approach and an interdisciplinary approach for collaborative healthcare provision. More so, medical anthropologists are equipped for in-depth cultural immersion, navigating cultural nuances, and promoting cross-cultural understanding of patient-centered healthcare. This can be achieved by nurturing and promoting anthropology beyond traditional boundaries. 

  In this panel, we invite scholars who endeavor to respond to the following questions:

  • What best does MA offer in non-academic strategies that can capture the best context-specific needs in Africa? 
  • How can we nurture and promote MA beyond the universities and healthcare set-ups? 
  • In African settings, what are the best ways for medical anthropologists to broker collaborations in the different healthcare set-ups (facility-based and community-based cohorts)? 
  • How can we foster MA transnational training models for information exchange, learning, and collaboration?
• 6. FRICTIONS IN HEALTHCARE ETHNOGRAPHY AS A MOTOR FOR IMPROVEMENT

  Conveners: Giulia Sinatti, Jennifer Creese, Julie Salvador

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  Abstract: This panel explores the productive potential of frictions in ethnographic research within healthcare settings. By "friction," we refer to the tensions, misalignments, and misunderstandings that arise in our collaborative relationships with research partners, commissioners, and clients in healthcare settings. As anthropologists, we often lament the challenges of communicating in (bio)medical contexts. Instead, this panel invites papers that view frictions as drivers of healthcare improvement.

  Friction can emerge during the conceptual phase of research design, especially when collaborating with those holding different epistemological and ontological perspectives. It can also surface around trust and ethics, particularly when sensitive data is first collected and later shared in publications or used to redesign healthcare interventions. We argue that these frictions are challenging, but also essential for impactful healthcare outcomes.

  We welcome contributions that examine instances where misalignments—whether conceptual, ethical, or practical, operational—helped advance research or fostered innovation in healthcare. Authors are encouraged to reflect on ethnographically informed experiences where friction prompted new ways of thinking, strengthened collaborations, or influenced outcomes.

  By focusing on friction as a site of interaction—between individuals, teams, or disciplines—this panel shifts the conversation from defending the value of ethnography in healthcare to recognizing how it can drive meaningful change. We invite papers that explore how, through moments of tension, frictions reveal opportunities to make a difference and rethink the role of anthropology in healthcare settings.
• 7. Addiction in New Cultural and Class Contexts

  Conveners: Joseph Tulasiewicz, Bhrigupati Singh

  Stream: Plural Perspectives on Health and Healing

  Abstract: Most qualitative research on addiction has engaged with and depicted a specific kind of addict: a marginalized American one, in some ways not that distant from the tropes of popular culture. This panel proposes moving research emphasis away from America, but also beyond the archetype of the down-and-out drug addict. If research focuses too heavily on extreme cases of American poverty and drug abuse, misleading generalisations about addiction may be extrapolated out onto people in wildly differing circumstances.

  By studying addiction in new contexts, anthropologists can ask serious questions about what addiction is - but also what recovery looks like. In her work on Mexican anexos, Angela Garcia argued that violence and coercion can have a place in addiction care. In his research on Russian placebo therapies, Eugene Raikhel questioned the idea of the lifelong spiritual journey of recovery popularised by AA. In her work on gambling addiction in Las Vegas, Natasha Schull showed how choice itself can become a medium of addiction, rather than something addicts are deprived of. As these anthropologists have done, this panel will question received wisdom about the causes of addiction and ask provocative questions about treatment best practice.
• 8. Bridging the Divide: Connecting Humans and Technology in Algorithmic Cultures

  Conveners: Zongtian Guo, Michal Frumer, Mette Høybye

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  Abstract: As a wave of health technologies—from wearable sensors and clinical decision-support algorithms to predictive AI—reshapes contemporary medicine, critically examining their epistemologies, promises, and consequences has never been more urgent. Adopting a medical anthropological perspective, this panel aims to interrogate how these innovations transform what counts as knowledge, who holds expertise, and how bodies and health are defined, managed, and made sense of. We welcome contributions that investigate how algorithmic cultures and their emergent valuation practices co-produce the conditions of healthcare, while also introducing novel uncertainties, ethical dilemmas, and inequalities.

  Reflecting our theme, we draw inspiration from scholarship that illuminates how algorithms become cultural artifacts shaping medical work; how professionals confront their opacity in critical diagnostic judgments; how human and AI collaboration in clinical documentation or decision-making reveals new styles of valuation; and how healthcare organizations negotiate the legitimacy of algorithmic interventions amid imaginaries of disruptive innovation and calls for continuity, repair, and care.

  We particularly encourage submissions that are ethnographically grounded and methodologically innovative, illuminating how cultural, political, and economic contexts shape the development, deployment, and interpretation of algorithmic systems. By bringing together diverse voices from within and beyond academia, this panel aims to foster a critical, constructive dialogue about how humans and technologies co-constitute the future of healthcare.

  We welcome submissions on topics including but not limited to:

  • Ethnographic studies of AI-driven diagnostic or therapeutic technologies
  • Valuation practices and ethics of data-driven health interventions
  • Reconfigurations of expertise and organizational negotiations
  • Algorithmic concepts of normality and abnormality
• 9. Sustaining life in debilitated environments: expanding ideas of contagion, chronicity and care in the “age of disability”

  Conveners: Júlia Fernandez, Rosamund Greiner

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  Abstract: The conditions of the anthropocene, neoliberal governance and colonial age produce diverse forms of injury, ill health and impairment (Segata et al., 2023), marking the ongoing debilitation of certain populations, which Berlant has described as “slow death” (2007, see also Puar, 2017). Such conditions concentrate vulnerabilities along existing lines of oppression, producing “embodied social inequalities with transgenerational potential” (Montesi and Calestani, 2021: 1). Taking up this idea, we call for a consideration of chronicity and impairment as socially transmitted, and how entanglements of kinship and care come to be implicated in these processes. This is exemplified in the concept of “dis/abling care” (Williamson, Engel and Fietz, 2023), which articulates the debilitating nature of gendered care work under conditions of chronic precarity (see also Han, 2012; Mattingly, 2014; Ballesteros, 2021). Further to this, the notion of “interembodiment” of chronic illness within relationships of care (Bunkley, 2022) troubles the Western, patriarchal epistemology and ontology of sovereign subjects with bounded, discrete bodies, prompting instead to think of illness and disability as defining conditions of our relational, interdependent existence (see Butler, 2016). Finally, expanding the idea of embodied vulnerabilities, Taylor’s conceptualisation of “disabled ecologies” (2021, 2024), or Dewachi’s “wounding ecologies” (2021) invite a fuller consideration of the interconnection of bodily injury beyond the human. We invite papers that contribute to an expansive understanding of the transmissibility and chronicity of illness and disability within debilitated infrastructures and environments, and that attend to how biosocial relations of vulnerability and care manifest under those conditions.
• 10. Exploring healthcare and research as creative practices

  Conveners: Annekatrin Skeide, Jeannette Pols

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  Abstract: In this panel we invite contributors to dive deeper into the creativity of healthcare practices and its medical anthropological articulations. 

  We welcome papers that:

  1. Explore socio-material approaches to conceptualizing health care practices and research as situated creative practices. How can we thoughtfully ‘create’ these practices through our research? What are conditions needed to make this creativity flourish, both in practice and research? What epistemologies can be developed with creativity as a starting point, and how do these relate to more standardized views of care and research? How can we engage with artistic forms of output? How can artistic methods be fruitfully used, and to what ends? How can creative methods allow for collaborations that invite research subjects to participate in ways they find acceptable, or even pleasant, while shifting or reframing researcher-research subject hierarchies?
  2. Examine the potential results of foregrounding creativity in healthcare. For instance, how does this focus blur the boundaries of what constitutes a healthy or sick individual physical body? How might it encourage us to conceptualize health and wellbeing in terms of navigating the complexities and enjoying the pleasures of everyday life? What are the socio-material consequences of creative healthcare practices? What role does creativity play in shaping ideas of the good life within medical anthropology? How might ‘a good life’ be defined, and how does this align with or diverge from medical understandings of health? Finally, what does creativity signify in this context?
• 11. Tinkering Revisited: Digitalization and Agency in the Healthcare Sector of the Future

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

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  Abstract: The concept of "tinkering", as introduced by Mol, describes care practices in medical settings where practitioners continuously adjust treatments based on patient responses and evolving conditions. It emphasizes the adaptive nature of healthcare, where practitioners creatively engage with the complexities of bodies and diseases. From the original concept, we understand that tinkering is integral to good care. But how does the increasing digitalization of healthcare reshape these practices? 

  Our panel will revisit tinkering in the age of digital health, examining the implications that arise when patients and their caregivers become increasingly "humans-in-the-loop," intertwined with digital innovations in the healthcare process. Whilst doing this, we also want to ponder the potential ambiguities of tinkering. Specifically, we will examine what happens to the improvisational essence of tinkering if care processes become more technologically driven, whether digital technologies "tame” or “proliferate” tinkering, and when these developments might be detrimental or desirable for good care. Moreover, we aim to investigate how traditional roles and responsibilities of nurses, doctors and also patients may change in novel tinkering practices. To do so, we use the concept of tinkering not in strict textual exegesis, but as a flexible framework. By doing so we hope to effectively analyze the situated specificities of healthcare practices in transition with respect to various digital tools and in a diverse array of medical settings.
• 12. More-than-human health: challenging anthropocentric paradigms through post-humanist, ecofeminist, indigenous and decolonial perspectives

  Conveners: Daniela Calvo, Sabina Vassileva

  Stream: Plural Perspectives on Health and Healing

  Abstract: Over the last four decades, Human Sciences have decentralized the human in the analysis of biosocial processes (including health), and blurred the lines separating the social and biological domains, as well as the human from nature and technology. 

  The term “more-than-human beings” (that includes humans and animate and inanimate beings belonging to the “natural,” technological” and “spiritual” spheres) specifically conveys the intention to break the dichotomy between human and non-human, showing how the non-human is entangled with the human while also exceeding it.

  This panel proposes to challenge the binary culture/nature and anthropocentric paradigms on health, well-being and care, engaging with post-humanist, ecofeminist, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives and methodologies, as well as with Science and Technology Studies (STS), Multispecies ethnographies, Environmental Humanities and new materialism.

  These approaches enable us to consider health, well-being and care in relational terms, as processes distributed along assemblages of more-than-human beings, where humans are just a part of a web of interconnectedness, entanglements, relationships and affects. 

  We look for original insights into the interplay of a variety of more-than-human beings in the production of health/illness, well-being and care: What “healths” and cosmopolitics emerge from the aforementioned methodologies and approaches? How the process of health and illness is lived and conceived in relational ontologies, and different cosmopolitics, and what temporalities do they enact? What bodies and embodied experienced are produced through more-than-human entanglements?  In what contexts are boundaries among more-than-human beings blurred, and in what circumstances is it on the contrary desirable to maintain them? 
• 13. Multi-perspectival ethnography in medical anthropology

  Conveners: Kiara Wickremasinghe, David Mosse

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology 

  Abstract: Anthropologists have always grappled with the epistemological and ethical dilemmas of singularity of perspective, representation, interpretation and authorship. They have sought to balance the self-representation of different social actors against an external analytical stance or metanarrative. Nowadays, the situation is complicated, first by the desire for different fieldwork orientations (observational, experiential, affective and relational), and second by the desire to multiply analytic perspectives. This is not least because research is increasingly designed as collaborative or intentionally polyphonic, so that the same phenomenon is understood from multiple perspectives, sometimes involving ethnographic fieldwork by teams holding different researcher viewpoints, with trained sensibility to different aspects of phenomena and different responsibilities in and beyond the research (e.g., clinical responsibility).

  In their research, medical anthropologists are increasingly partnering with healthcare practitioners, people with lived experience and policymakers. Moreover, ethnographers may carry within themselves different perspectives from their roles as researchers, healthcare practitioners, service users, carers (and more). 

  This panel aims to explore the way medical anthropologists invite and navigate multiple roles, positions and perspectives in conducting research, including within themselves (internal polyphony). Claims that research is collaborative and multi-perspectival in intention and design are commonplace, but we encourage focus on the negotiation of this multiplicity in practice, in the conduct of fieldwork, analysis, authorship and publication. What are the opportunities or limits on fieldwork partnerships, co-writing or co-production? What different research relationships are possible? What kinds of research asymmetries appear indissoluble? How can marginalised voices be amplified justly and safely? 
• 14. Forever Chemicals and Reproductive Health: Anthropological Perspectives on Inequities, Alternatives, and Policy Dialogs

  Conveners: Pratyusha Kiran

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  Abstract: The pervasive presence of “forever chemicals” (e.g., PFAS, BPA, and phthalates) in our environment poses a profound threat to reproductive health. From endocrine disruption to infertility and pregnancy complications, these chemicals have far-reaching impacts. This panel examines the intersections of medical anthropology, environmental toxicity, and reproductive health, calling for papers that address how forever chemicals disproportionately affect vulnerable populations and illuminate pathways for systemic change.

  We invite discussions on the unequal burden of exposure, emphasizing how socioeconomic status, race, gender, and geography shape health outcomes. How do these toxins perpetuate inequities, particularly among marginalized communities with limited access to safe products or healthcare? What systemic and structural forces exacerbate these disparities? Additionally, the panel seeks contributions on sustainable alternatives, policy frameworks, and grassroots advocacy aimed at reducing exposure and ensuring equitable health protections. The panel also welcomes discussions that explore the complex intersections of health and chemical exposure in the Global South.

  By exploring the biological, social, and political dimensions of forever chemicals, this panel aims to foster interdisciplinary conversations about their reproductive health impacts and envision actionable solutions for a healthier and more equitable future.
• 15. The platformization of medicine? Digital diagnostics, advanced therapies, and drug repurposing

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

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  Abstract: Western medicine is currently witnessing profound transformations in how disease is diagnosed, enacted and treated. With the advent of precision medicine, new disease categories are emerging and existing classifications redrawn (Navne 2023; Wadmann 2023). Rapid advances in computational power and machine learning are expanding conventional ways of identifying and delineating ill health by capturing datafied signs of disease (Semel, 2022). Meanwhile, the blockbuster era of chemical mass production is giving way to advanced, targeted therapies such as immunotherapy for cancers and gene and cell therapies (McGuire, 2020). Underwriting these developments is the growing importance of platforms for medical research, pharmaceutical R&D and healthcare more broadly. Platforms combine (digital) technology with particular organizational forms (Faulkner-Gurstein & Wyatt 2021). While there are many types of platforms, they share the aim of generating value by occupying a strategic place within a proprietary network. Platformization refers to the strategies pursued to obtain such a location – whether by private or governmental actors (ibid). Some governments invest heavily in digital infrastructures to brand their nations as research hubs (Tupasela 2021); biotech companies and hospitals strive to develop molecular and data platforms for targeted therapies (Maso et al. 2019; Kleinhout-Vliek et al. 2024); and data-based advances are likewise accelerating the identification of ‘old’ medicines for ‘new’ indications (Pushpakom et al., 2019). Situated at the nexus between medical anthropology and science and technology studies, this panel invites papers that offer critical analysis of the processes and implications of attempts at redefining medical diagnostics and treatment through platformization.
• 16. African perspectives on health and wellbeing

  Conveners: Ellen Forsman Larsson

  Stream: Plural Perspectives on Health and Healing

  Abstract: Africa is often the setting for work carried out by medical anthropologists. We write about lack of healthcare access, misguided foreign development projects, and the impact of exploitation by state or industry on disease-burdened communities. Much of this stems from the laudable attempt to shine light on health disparities and the structures of violence present in Western development discourse. However, this disciplinary emphasis can unintentionally end up replicating the very problem we identify. We spend so much time writing about how the export of Western biomedicine squeezes out local understandings of health, that we fail to pay attention to what those local understandings are. As a result, when anthropologists think of vernacular articulations of health and wellbeing, African perspectives are particularly absent.

  The purpose of this panel is therefore to shift perspectives, and promote the numerous and diverse healing strategies present in African nations today. The panel will showcase this medically plural landscape, its varied knowledge systems and rich traditions of local medicine. It will also ask, what could we all learn by paying more attention to African wellbeing practices?
• 17. Care and Transition in Chronic and Rare Conditions

  Conveners: Malgorzata Rajtar, Eva-Maria Knoll

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  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.
• 18. Navigating Reproductive Ambivalence: Strategies and Subjectivities across the Global North and South

  Conveners: Poonam Kamath, Luminita Mandache

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction 

  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.
• 19. Entangled temporalities of the experience of “chronic living” with technological devices

  Conveners: Agathe Camus, Lucie Dalibert, Valentine Gourinat

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  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.
• 20. Interrogating Medical Pluralism in Global Health: Navigating Diverse Forms of Healing and Caring in the Contemporary Healthcare Framework

  Conveners: Daniele Mario Buonomo, Xu Liu, Matteo Valoncini

  Stream: Plural Perspectives on Health and Healing

  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? 
• 21. Exhaustion as a temporal and social predicament

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

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  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.
• 22. Neo-Eugenic Practices and Reproductive Governance across the Globe

  Conveners: Lucia Gentile, Clémence Jullien

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction 

  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.
• 23. Doing Care: pedagogy, methodology, fieldwork

  Conveners: Arushi Sahay, Alankrita Anand

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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
• 24. Decoupling Health and Well-Being in Contexts of Conflict and Environmental Distress

  Conveners: Ahmad Moradi, Letizia Bonanno

  Stream: Health and Environment 

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

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

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  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.
• 26. Unstable Environments: Health and Healing in Remote Places

  Conveners: Meoïn Hagège, Laura Burke

  Stream: Health and Environment 

  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.
• 27. Biometric Assemblages in Medicine and Healthcare

  Conveners: Sofie Kronberger, Paul Trauttmansdorff

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  Abstract: The assessment of bodies through measurements has played a critical role in medicine and healthcare. Biometrics have established regimes of evaluation designed to surveil, analyze, and categorize these bodies. These technologies of objectification have been fundamental in producing classificatory systems, values, and standards, which have also fostered discrimination, marginalization, and violence in medicine and healthcare. Nonetheless, they are currently gaining significance in medical settings, driven by the digitalization and automation of personalized medicine and digital health.

  Medical biometrics include emotion detection, voice analysis, retinal scans, fingerprinting, face recognition, and skin screening. While such technologies often promise groundbreaking solutions and transformative visions of cure, they also present significant challenges. They reflect economic inequalities, reinforce normative ideals and assumptions about bodies, raise data protection concerns, introduce racial/gender bias, have psychological and social impacts, or reinforce epistemic and historical injustices.

  Our panel invites contributions that reflect diverse research approaches and analyses of biometric medicine and healthcare. We aim to investigate biometric assemblages shaped by datafication, automation, and algorithmic processing while emphasizing the need for ethnographic research and qualitative inquiry. Key questions may relate to

  • socio-cultural promises and assumptions that underly biometric assemblages;
  • shifting responsibilities and accountabilities for errors, discrimination, or bias in medical biometrics;
  • historical/colonial legacies shaping biometric assemblages and their role in (de-) constructing categories of (non-)humanity and able-bodiedness;  
  • implications of, resistance against, and adaption to health surveillance;
  • issues of privacy, autonomy, and consent;
  • the role of biometrics in reinforcing/challenging inequalities in medicine and healthcare.
• 28. Mental health in South Asia, panacea and peril.

  Conveners: Armaan Mullick Alkazi, Laila Rajani

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

   

  Abstract: Across South Asia, therapeutic interventions are being offered as solutions to problems that have little to do with mental ill-health. For better or worse, mental health has become a dominant paradigm to conceptualise and mitigate health concerns. In this panel, we examine how mental ill-health is understood and conceptualised by different public health actors (doctors, psychiatrists, epidemiologists, public health officials and community health workers) and what interventions come out of these articulations. The animating logics of different health programs and their histories often mix in distinct and complex ways, for example how does the DOTS paradigm in Tuberculosis interact with normative notions of family when ‘counselling’ single men on the street. Where do therapeutic ideas of ‘awareness’, ‘counselling’ direct our energy towards, how do they mask or reveal structural social forces, what are their normative underpinnings and how do they change as we move across locations? These articulations are being further changed by new forms of schematization through technological changes, how do you counsel through a schema of prompts suggested by an app? We invite papers that trace histories, explore connections and show the implications of the increasing power of mental health interventions in the sub-continent.  
• 29. Perception through Interaction/Interaction through Perception

  Conveners: Michele Friedner, Cordelia Erikson-Davis

  Stream: Perception through Interaction/Interaction through Perception

  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!
• 30. Health as ecology: promises of health and well-being in biotechnological approaches across humans and more-than-humans

  Conveners: Victor Secco, Charlotte Brives

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  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.
• 31. Challenging dominant medico-political models through sensory ecologies of health

  Conveners: Josephine Biglin, Kristina Baines, Elisabeth Hsu

  Stream: Plural Perspectives on Health and Healing

  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.
• 32. Rethinking Species Extinction and Disease Eradication

  Conveners: Rebecca Marsland, James Staples

  Stream: Health and Environment

  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

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

  Stream: Health and Environment

  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.
• 34. Organizing Care as a research practice: Imaginative approaches

  Conveners: Sabya Van Elswijk, Matouš Jelínek

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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. 
• 35. Redefining Reproductive Temporalities: Bodies, Gender, Care, and Contestations in Health and Well-Being

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

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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.
• 36. Exploring health in the context of territorial inequalities

  Conveners: Daniele Karasz, Sladana Adamovic, Adrienne Homberger

  Stream: Health in/and Crisis

  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.
• 37. Genital Expectations: A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Gendered Meanings, Norms, and Practices Surrounding Genitalia (V3 Part I)

  Conveners: Hannelore Van Bavel, Vivien Lou

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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.
• 38. The Politics and Epistemologies of Collaboration: Inter/Transdisciplinarity as Method in Techno-Human Data Assemblages

  Conveners: Lisa Lehner, Roberta Raffaetà

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  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.
• 39. Obstetric Violence, Care, and Technologies

  Conveners: Elif Gül, Rodante van der Waal

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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

  Conveners: Andie Thompson

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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

  Conveners: Christopher Zraunig, Max Schnepf

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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.
• 42. History in Care: Tracing Historical Entanglements

  Conveners: Kristine Krause, Monika Palmberger

  Stream: Health in/and Crisis

  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.
• 43. Co-produced Intersectional Justice and Trauma-informed ethnographic research methodologies: emancipation and inclusion possibilities and co-optation risks 

  Conveners: Carolina Borda, Xandra Miguel Lorenzo

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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

  Conveners: Sabine Hess, Reza Bayat, Marie Fröhlich

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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.
• 45. Making sense of mortality in the era of polycrisis

  Conveners: Maija Butters

  Stream: Health in/and Crisis

  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
• 46. Sociality with/through AI in Health and Medicine: Current Figurations, Imagined Futures

  Conveners: Bernhard Hadolt

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  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.
• 47. The Uterus: Knowledges, Practices, Imaginaries

  Conveners: Leah Eades, Marie de Lutz

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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?
• 48. Epistemological bounds of medical technologies: Iatrogenic effects and new conceptions of health

  Conveners: Alexandra Jønsson

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  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.
• 49. (Post)socialist health and medicine: examining alternative political economies, biopolitics and circulations

  Conveners: Alila Brossard Antonielli, Nils Graber

  Stream: Health in/and Crisis

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

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

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

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

  Conveners: Gerardo Rodriguez Solis, Seth M. Holmes

  Stream: Health and Environment

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

  Conveners: Paras Arora, Shubha Ranganathan

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

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

  Conveners: Pernille Andreassen, Fernanda Scagliusi, Alexandra Brewis

  Stream: Medicine and Technologies

  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.  
• 54. Transforming Reproduction: Exploring Advances in Technology, Gender, and Kinship

  Conveners: Amel Alghrani

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  Abstract: Advancements in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and social movements have expanded possibilities for reproduction, challenging cisheteronormative notions of gender, sex and kinship. These innovations arise amidst global crises, geopolitical conflicts and rising inequalities, which exacerbate healthcare disparities and reshape socio-political relations and bodily autonomy. This panel examines the ethical, legal, and socio-cultural implications of ARTs like uterus transplants for cisgender and transgender individuals, ectogenesis (artificial womb technology), stem cell-based embryo models, and reproductive negligence revealed by genealogical tools.

  By situating these technologies within discussions on gender fluidity and queerness of kinship, the panel explores ART’s intersections with bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and socio-political contestations. It critically interrogates the colonial legacies within biomedicine and technoscience to reimagine equitable and inclusive reproductive futures.

  Key questions include: How do uterus transplants and ectogenesis challenge gendered reproduction frameworks? What are ART’s implications for kinship and redefining parenthood? How do genealogical technologies reshape accountability in ART? What role does AI play in fertility treatments, and how might it disrupt inequities?  This panel fosters interdisciplinary dialogue to expand reproductive possibilities beyond traditional binaries.

  Format:

  4-5 presenters will share insights, followed by audience discussion to bridge disciplinary perspectives.

  Proposed Contributions:

  • Uterus Transplants and Transgender Reproduction
  • Ectogenesis and the Redefinition of Birth
  • Stem Cell-Based Embryo Models and Regulatory Challenges
  • Genealogical Technologies and Reproductive Negligence
  • AI’s Impact on Fertility Treatment

  Panel aligns with “Redefinitions of Health and Well-being” by addressing ART’s transformative role in reproduction, gender, and kinship, contributing to discussions on reproductive justice in a postcolonial era.
• 55. Structural Competency: Tracing the Influence of Social Structures in Health as a Research and Teaching Agenda

  Conveners: Mirko Pasquini, Margret Jäger

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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.
• 56. Doing Medical Anthropology in the Anthropocene

  Conveners: Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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.
• 57. Applied Medical Anthropology in Times of Crisis

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

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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. 
• 58. Crossing Boundaries between Medical Anthropology and Biomedicine (AGEM Roundtable)

  Conveners: Ehler Voss, Márcio Vilar, Stefan Reinsch

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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
• 59. Somatization of Disasters: Rethinking Event, Chronicity, and Embodied Temporalities

  Conveners: Begüm Ergün, Elif İrem Az

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  Abstract: This roundtable investigates how disasters inscribe themselves into the life-worlds of affected communities, reshaping their modes of being-in-the-world and temporal horizons. Disasters—whether political violence, protracted displacement, environmental degradation, or acute catastrophes—generate somatic and affective imprints that resist the conventional temporal and political-economic frameworks of crisis and recovery. Moving beyond the logics of emergency response, we aim to explore how the lived experience of becoming-through-disaster challenges dominant medical, bureaucratic, and humanitarian paradigms that reduce suffering to measurable conditions.

  We focus on ethnographically situated concepts and understandings of becoming-through-disaster, which we can cluster under what we call the somatization of disasters. Drawing on diverse field sites and frameworks, this roundtable explores how bodies come to inhabit yet-to-be-theorized forms of becoming-through-disaster. These embodied experiences reconfigure temporal horizons, where past, present, and future coalesce into an ongoing process of meaning-making, or diverge from each other in unexpected ways. We aim to examine how such disaster somatization reveals suffering and endurance as perpetually unfolding phenomena, rather than as the results of a discrete event or set of events.

  Bringing together scholars, practitioners, and activists, we seek to advance both theoretical and methodological approaches for engaging with the chronicity of disasters while addressing implications for health interventions, political organizing, and advocacy. Key questions include, but are not limited to: How do bodies inhabit disaster experiences? How might these embodied experiences offer alternative narratives to dominant paradigms of recovery? What conceptual tools might better capture the temporalities of disaster-related suffering, endurance, struggle, and the transformation of life-worlds?
• 60. Crisis of Digital Addictions: Anthropological Perspectives on a Growing Concern

  Conveners: Suzana Jovicic

  Stream: Health in/and Crisis

  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.  
• 61. Closing the distance? Medical anthropology between (health) activism and academia

  Conveners: Sara Gerotto, Lucia Mair

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

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

  Conveners: Kim Sigmund

  Stream: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction

  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.  
• 63. How do hospitals (continue) to matter to anthropologists?

  Conveners: Fanny Chabrol, Amina Soulimani

  Stream: Doing Medical Anthropology

  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.
• 64. The Role of the Disabled Artist in the Polycrisis — Lived Experience, Chronicity, and Interdependence

  Conveners: Justus Harris, Liza Bernstein

  Stream: Disability and Chronicity

  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?
• 65. THE ULTIMATE MEDICINE: CENTRING DECOLONIAL FEMINISM IN REDEFINING GLOBAL HEALTH

  Conveners: Chamindra Weerawardhana, Neelam Raina

  Stream: Health in/and Crisis

  Abstract: The sector of global health, and the practice of medicine, are deeply shaped by fault lines of control. Colonialist, racialized, gendered, socioeconomic and many other hierarchies continue to persist, and determine how people benefit (or not) from healthcare that serves their best interests. Existing critiques of these multiple inequities are often built along axes of antidiscrimination, racial justice, postcolonial perspectives, and intersectionality, to name but a few. Despite the tremendous worth of this body of work, many analysts and changemakers, especially from the majority world, are no strangers to the elephant in the room – the global health sector’s reluctance to constructively engage with decolonial feminism. A feminist discourse that is deeply inspired by indigenous feminist thought, feminist innovations of the majority world, and critical feminist traditions of the global north [e.g. the black feminist tradition of Turtle Island], decolonial feminism calls upon us to think beyond the confines of the systems, structures and strictures that surround us [which the late Dr bell hooks aptly defined as the ‘imperialist capitalist white supremacist patriarchy’]. Focused on de-centering power structures, raising critical interrogations, decolonial feminism forces us to individually and collectively re-imagine and re-define the realities around us, and envision more caring, nurturing, and comforting futures – a process best defined as ‘decolonial feminist worldmaking’. 

  This roundtable will bring together a group of high-profile international experts, who will highlight the necessity of decolonial feminism as a core tool and crucial epistemic innovation to re-imagine global health. 

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

  Conveners: Andreas Krauskopf, Paula Pospichal, Agnes Köchl

  Stream: Other

  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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• Call for Labs

  Conveners: Ursula Probst

  Stream: Other

  Abstract: The MAE/EASA 2025 Conference on Medical Anthropology is inviting proposals for Laboratories that explore the theme "Redefinitions of Health and Well-being." This format aims to foster experimentation and interdisciplinary conversations.

  Laboratory sessions can explore a variety of methods, concepts, ideas and approaches with the aim of stimulating critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and imagination. Forms of expression may include, but are not limited to, music, drawing, embroidery, photography, poetry, mapping, urban exploration, activities in parks or along canals, and guided walks. Sessions can be scheduled for either 90 or 105 minutes: those planning outdoor activities will have 105 minutes available, while indoor sessions will be scheduled for 90 minutes.

  Please note that due to the hybrid format of the conference, labs can be proposed for either on-site or hybrid participation. For hybrid labs, a pre-registration process is required and at least one organiser must be present on-site to facilitate the session. It is the responsibility of the conveners to manage the pre-registration process.

  Proposals must contain:

  • Lab title
  • the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the convenor(s) (max 3)
  • abstract (up to 250 words) outlining the Lab's objectives, methods, and procedures.
  • technical requirements (include any technological, material and logistical questions necessary for the Lab)
  • venue/location (indicate any requirements, as well as any pre-agreements you have reached with relevant groups/institutions)
  • modality (hybrid or on site only); please also indicate if there is a limit to the number of participants and if the lab requires pre-registration.