AGEM
Willkommen bei der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ethnologie und Medizin (AGEM)
Die AGEM ist ein 1970 gegründeter gemeinnütziger Verein mit dem Ziel, die Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Medizin, den angrenzenden Naturwissenschaften und den Kultur‑, Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften zu fördern und dadurch das Studium des interdisziplinären Arbeitsfelds Ethnologie und Medizin zu intensivieren.
Was wir tun
- Herausgabe der Zeitschrift Curare
- Durchführung von Tagungen
- Dokumentation von Literatur und Informationen
Curare
Zeitschrift für Medizinethnologie
aktuelle Ausgabe | Archiv aller Ausgaben | Call for Papers
Veranstaltungen
Gert Levy: „Marary Andriana“ – Die Kranken sind die Könige. Transkulturelle Psychiatrie im Spiegel ethnopsychiatrischer Praxis
Vortrag
„Ethnopsychiatrie – neue Wege in der Behandlung Geflüchteter in der Dominanzkultur?”, Veranstaltungsreihe, organisiert von der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
„Ethnopsychiatrie – neue Wege in der Behandlung Geflüchteter in der Dominanzkultur?”
Die Veranstaltungsreihe, organisiert von der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, findet jeden 2. Mittwoch ab 15. Oktober 2025 bis 14. Januar 2026 in insgesamt vier Terminen statt. Eine Anmeldung über die Webseite ist erwünscht.
Deutschland ist ein Einwanderungsland, auch wenn Einige dies nicht wahrhaben wollen. Menschen aus allen Teilen der Erde leben in Deutschland, von denen viele eine Traumatisierung erfahren haben, weil sie unter beklagenswerten Umständen geflüchtet sind. Gewalterfahrungen vor und während der Flucht waren für sie allgegenwärtig. Unter diesen Geflüchteten befinden sich viele sehr junge Menschen und auch alleinstehende Kinder. Ihr Status in diesem Lande ist prekär. Ohne Sprachkenntnisse, ohne angemessene schulische Bildung und ohne therapeutische Betreuung sind sie sich selbst überlassen. Wir sind zurzeit nicht in der Lage, ihnen therapeutisch zu helfen, nicht nur, weil der politische Wille dazu fehlt, sondern auch, weil Therapeut:innen mit wenigen Ausnahmen nicht dafür ausgebildet sind, Menschen aus anderen Kulturen angemessen zu betreuen.
Die Vortragsreihe zur Ethnopsychiatrie wird in vier Teilen versuchen, die Geschichte und Praxis der Therapie von Angehörigen einer anderen Kultur zu erläutern und deutlich zu machen, dass die Ausbildung von kultursensiblen Therapeut:innen dringend geboten ist. Dies ist nicht nur eine Forderung, die sich aus dem Gebot der Menschlichkeit ergibt, sondern eine politische Notwendigkeit, um Radikalisierungen und mehr Gewalt als Folge von erlittenen Traumata zu verhindern.
Die Vortragenden sind Prof. Dr. Norbert Finzsch, Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität Berlin, Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kluge, Leiterin des Zentrums für Interkulturelle Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie and der Charité Berlin, Gert Levy, langjähriger Psychotherapeut auf dem Gebiet interkultureller Therapie, und Rozerin Baysöz Kind, Doktorandin der Psychotherapiewissenschaft an der Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität Berlin.
Eine Anmeldung ist über die jeweiligen Links auf den Seiten möglich:
„Marary Andriana“ – Die Kranken sind die Könige. Transkulturelle Psychiatrie im Spiegel ethnopsychiatrischer Praxis
Gert Levy
Mittwoch, 10. Dezember 2025, 19 Uhr
Unter den Linden 8, Theodor-Fontane-Saal
Weitere Voträge:
„Er versteht mich nicht“ – Wenn geflüchtete Kinder in der Psychotherapie nicht ankommen
Rozerin Baysöz Kind
Mittwoch, 14. Januar 2026, 19 Uhr
Unter den Linden 8, Theodor-Fontane-Saal
Abortion and Miscarriage: Narratives, Practices, Discourses
Call for Papers
CfP for Special Issue of Curare
Democracy as Health (Workshop & Edited Volume)
Call for Papers
CfP for Workshop & Edited Volume
„Democracy as Health”
Workshop and Edited Volume
June 29–30, 2026,
Geneva, Switzerland
Deadline for submission: January 5th, 2026
This is an announcement for a call for papers for a workshop taking place next summer, which intends to lead to an edited volume, titled ‘Democracy as Health.’ This event will take place in Geneva on June 29–30, 2026, organized by Robert Dean Smith and Professor Aditya Bharadwaj from the Geneva Graduate Institute. We have the honor to be joined by keynote speakers including Professors Jessica Mulligan, Sandra Bärnreuther, Janina Kehr, and Ruth Prince.
The full call for papers is available at the link below, and attached. We encourage ethnographically grounded perspectives across all contexts. Abstract submissions of up to 500 words should be sent to Robert.Smith@graduateinstitute.ch no later than January 5th, 2026. The workshop is in person. Partial funding stipends are available for participants on a need-based basis. Participants should indicate their interest in financial support at the time of their application. Should you have any questions, please also feel free to reach out to me directly.
CfP:
Globally, publicly funded healthcare has become increasingly politicized within democratic processes over the past decades. Ranging from the politicization of the United States’ Affordable Care Act dubbed ‘ObamaCare,’ the resistance to the increasing privatization of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, populist political brandings of healthcare infrastructures in South Asia, or citizen activism across contexts, health has increasingly entered democratic agendas. Contrasting from 20th century political movements around healthcare that garnered momentum through specific disease categories, such as HIV-AIDS (Biehl 2004) or affliction of specifically marginalized populations (Petryna 2013), contemporary politicizations are increasingly mobilizing broad visions of ‘health’ for electoral gains (Kehr, Muinde, and Prince 2023; Cooper, 2019). In many settings, such politicizations take the form of one-off schemes that are typically politically temporary and partial in nature, relying on decades of state neglect in healthcare to be perceived as successful by the electorate. Paradoxically, this rising electoral-politicization of health services and programs also takes place within contexts of rising health austerity.
Therefore, in this workshop, we seek to use this emergence of health as an explicit object of electoral-political agendas to think through the contemporary relationship between democracy and health, and more broadly the politics of bio-politics. The concept of ‘politics,’ most broadly, has been a longstanding concern for medical anthropologists’ engagement with patients’ experiences, and understandings of power. Seminally, Foucault’s notion of ‘biopolitics’ has provided a conceptual foundation for medical anthropologists to make sense of how processes of subjectivization take place within health’s domains, and the governmental apparatuses that animate those processes. Notably, biopolitically inspired frameworks of politics have shaped how anthropologists engage with how patients mobilize pathological-biological identities to place citizenship claims upon the state (Rose and Novas 2005; Biehl 2004; Petryna 2013; Ticktin 2011 Nguyen 2010), how biomedical knowledge can be used to claim authority in state spaces (Adams 1998), or how medicine is mobilized as a symbol of national modernity (Brotherton 2012; Al-Dewachi 2017). Yet, neighboring disciplines have pointed out that the use of politics in this literature may risk confining itself to the realm of the biological, and can “undermine the political” as an analytical category by discounting how other forms of politics intersect with biologized politics of health (Bird and Lynch 2019). Overall, the concept of ‘politics,’ often quickly glossed through the ‘politics of health,’ maintains a degree of ambivalence in the cannon of medical anthropology.
In response, this workshop seeks to bring together leading scholars to ethnographically think through this in a way that is generative of novel conceptual formulations to understand the contemporary relationship between democracy and health. Democracy, in this sense, while grounded in processes of electoral-politics, is not empirically confined to the practice of voting nor the ritual of elections, but seeks to account for the different realms of the political that work alongside, within, and through, and are also constructed by, the politics of health. In approaching these questions, we aim to more explicitly bring together literature in medical and political anthropology. Doing so particularly takes stalk of how concepts of political, affective feelings of political existence, and the material-spectral realities of the state inform subjectivities towards health and care (Aretxaga 2003; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Candea 2011; Postero and Elinoff 2019; Steet 2012; Vollebergh, Koning, and Marchesi, 2021). This intersection presents opportunities to engage with different readings of biopolitics. Specifically, early Foucauldian ideas of locatable, tangible ‘veins of power’ — as possible to see within biomedical clinics — as well as later Foucauldian ideas that power is everywhere — as possible to see within political affects — which need alignment in order to understand contemporary formations of democracy as health.
This edited volume revolves around the idea that, amidst rising fascist, authoritarian tendencies that rely upon health as an electoral-political tool, it is increasingly urgent to reimagine the relationship between democracy and health. This volume will seek to revolve around the following central questions:
· How does democracy reimagine the idea of health as an optic, a good, a right, a service, and more, in relation to the state and the private sector?
· What do democratic processes do to the figure of the clinic and how does it modulate its gaze?
· What does the relationship between democracy and health do to imaginations and relationalities between states and subjects?
· How does health’s electoral-political uptake transmit into the realm of patient experience, subjectivity and embodiment?
Full CfP as PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x2s1TAuj-E5nbcM9c9GBcbhC3xF0kMWp/view?usp=drive_link














