“Producing knowledge, governing populations: Anthropology, science studies and health policies” conference
Ecole normale supérieure of Lyon, 10-13 September 2013
Organizers: Charlotte Brives, Frédéric Le Marcis, Emilia Sanabria, Josiane Tantchou
To register, and for the final pdf program, please visit the conference website
http://colloquehssa.sciencesconf.org
The conference will open with Keynotes from Bruno Latour & Vinh Kim Nguyen and will close with Commentaries from Didier Fassin & Kaushik Sunder Rajan
ABSTRACT: Medical anthropologists examine health inequalities, pharmaceutical developments, public health policies, interventions on populations. They have placed the body in context and decentered biomedical notions of health and illness as they have revealed changing definition of old age and death or the patenting of life. These developments index a transforming relationship between humanity and health, one made visible in the relationship between subjectivity, misfortune –embodied or not – and the forms of political engagement these incite. This research, sensitive to how life is not at the heart of our ways of thinking and doing politics, remains haunted by Foucault’s works on biopower and, increasingly, the care of the self. Science and technology studies (STS) has shown how scientific production creates new standards and values, how such works fans out through complex networks, each time redefining the world in which we live. STS research on biomedicine has grown, but often isolated from conversations and debates in the anthropology of health and medical anthropology. Critics of STS accuse this field of inadequate fieldwork and a heavy-handed approach to forcing data to fit pre-established theoretical framework, while critics of medical anthropology complain that rich accounts of local illness knowledge and practice are too often opposed to a monolithic and “black-boxed” version of biomedicine. Yet can we do without a real exchange between these two disciplines? While the paradigm of evidence-based medicine seems to enjoy unquestioned legitimacy today, everyone agrees that this legitimacy is the byproduct of ongoing work engaging life sciences experts, health specialists and of the mobilization of social and political dynamics. Thus evidence-based medicine is the result of an effort which, although taking the appearance of evidence, is the result of a process aiming at building its own legitimacy. Based on processes rather than given facts, evidence-based medicine is at the heart of the debate we hope to develop during this meeting. The primary objective of this conference is to open, or rather to broaden, the space for exchanges between anthropology of health and science studies around evidence based-medicine: what are its contributions, its limitations, but also its constraints? How does it produce, impose or recompose within its everyday activities norms and standards of care? How does it redefine our conceptions of health, body and ailments afflicting us? How does it change our system of values? How does it influence the politics defining policies implemented within our health systems? The panels are structured around three sets of issues: 1) Making evidence, 2) Making bodies comparable & 3) Standardizing practices, practicing standards.
We look forward to welcoming you to Lyon in September.
