Contemporary Issues in Medical Anthropology

Health, illness and medicine are ubiquitous in contemporary public debates but are rarely investigated critically. Today, medical anthropology faces novel and fruitful challenges in its relation to biomedicine, public health and international health policy, whether as fields of investigation or as areas of collaboration. How, specifically, can medical anthropology contribute to research on health and wellbeing in the global north and the global south? We will examine the challenges medical anthropologists face in research collaborations with public health, international health organisations, and medical professionals, by for example investigating how biomedicine's authoritative knowledge silences patients' experience, especially when these belong to marginalised or underrepresented groups. Or by investigating how economic power of pharmaceutical companies impact the access to care of deprived citizens and eschew geopolitical dimensions of health for people in the global south. An important field is also to engage and give prominence to local epistemologies and practices, whether they are presented as alternative or complementary to hegemonic biomedical structures. This course lets you examine issues such as 'the body', digital health, mental health, hospital ethnography, pharmaceuticals, anatomy, and technologies for assisted reproduction.