Health activism and citizenship

The specificities of health vis-à-vis citizenship have been understood through work on biomedical citizenship, which has focussed on, first the exclusion of the unhealthy from the national body via medical borders (Martin 1990; Collier and Rabinow 2004; Willen 2012; Qureshi 2013) and second, instances of patient activism, often entailing demands for right to health services and treatment (Petryna 2004; Rose and Novas 2005; Robins 2006; Nguyen et al. 2007; Qureshi 2014). Health professionals have sometimes been noted to be involved in patient activism (e.g. Mbali 2013), yet their own political mobilisation is under-studied. There is an acknowledged dearth of research on the political dynamics of the health workforce in LMICs (e.g. Russo et al. 2019) and even less on how their collective action is constructed and legitimated (Kowalchuk 2011; Koon 2021). Anthropologists have noted doctors’ mobilisation (Hamdy and Bayoumi 2016), as well as doctors’ organisation around health sector conditions (Pushkar 2019; Tomkow et al. 2020; Kehr 2023). This session aims to explore how health professionals’ clinical and civic roles may intertwine in ways that complicate the conceptualisation of health citizenship and improve access to health.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Chrystal Macmillan Building, The University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

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