CfP: The Doctor. Contemporary perspectives

Date
Apr 14 , 2025 

Call for Papers for a pan­el at AAA

Cfp for a pan­el at AAA titled „The Doc­tor: Con­tem­po­rary perspectives”.

We are seek­ing a few more con­tri­bu­tions pri­or to the date of sub­mis­sion, April 16th. Please find the abstract below, and should you be inter­est­ed, please mail us your abstract of no more than 1500 char­ac­ters (exclud­ing title) by April 14th. 

Orga­niz­ers:
Robert D. Smith (Gene­va Grad­u­ate Insti­tute); Sreya Dut­ta Chowd­hury (Max Plank Insti­tute of Social Anthropology)
Discussant:
Andrew McDow­ell (Tulane University)

Title: „The Doc­tor: Con­tem­po­rary perspectives”

Pan­el Abstract:

Since the advent of con­tem­po­rary bio­med­i­cine, doc­tors have been a cen­tral cat­e­go­ry for cul­tur­al inquiry. Anthro­pol­o­gists have analysed how doc­tors are often seen as sources of author­i­ty, actors of care and vio­lence, sym­bols of hope and nation­al moder­ni­ty, and even (demi)gods in some cul­tur­al con­texts. At the same time, the stan­dard­iza­tion of dis­ease screen­ings and treat­ment pro­to­cols, the rou­tiniza­tion of the use of med­ical diag­nos­tics, and the every­day­ness of ‘eat­ing drugs’ pro­duces con­texts where ‘every­one is a doc­tor.’ In con­texts of ris­ing glob­al med­ical scarci­ty, peo­ple seek­ing med­ical atten­tion find them­selves in sit­u­a­tions where there are no prac­tic­ing doc­tors and yet draw upon the wide­spread avail­abil­i­ty of med­ical advice, loose med­i­cines, and even doc­tors’ pre­scrip­tions with­out actu­al­ly vis­it­ing a doc­tor. This allows for new actors to arise, such as the well doc­u­ment­ed preva­lence of infor­mal prac­ti­tion­ers who dab­ble in bio­med­i­cine, but also the aux­il­iary actors through state poli­cies that attempt to fill the widen­ing gap between patients and health sys­tems. This push­es us to think about the chang­ing bioso­cial orders that get made and remade through bio­med­i­cine as well as the evolv­ing ped­a­gog­i­cal prac­tices of pub­lic health and biomedicine. 

There­fore, in this pan­el, we ask: ‘what is a doc­tor?’ Build­ing upon long­stand­ing dis­cus­sions of what hap­pens ‘when there is no doc­tor’ and the respon­si­bi­liza­tion of med­ical risk for bioso­cial cit­i­zens, we are inter­est­ed in how patients and med­ical doc­tors ascribe mean­ings to the sym­bol of ‘the doc­tor.’ Fur­ther, we are inter­est­ed in how the phe­nom­e­na of the clin­i­cal encounter is reframed through aux­il­iary actors like health offi­cers, mul­ti-pur­pose nurs­es, health vol­un­teers and dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies like telemed­i­cine that now medi­ate doc­tor-patient rela­tion­ships. As more and more somat­ic and inter­ac­tive clin­i­cal-work becomes medi­at­ed through actors and tech­nolo­gies oth­er than the doc­tor, we tra­verse the space between a doc­tor and patient to rethink the clin­i­cal encounter and its actors. The papers in this pan­el unpack the idea of ‘the doc­tor’ and how the con­tem­po­rary moment of strat­i­fied care gen­er­ates new ideas about what con­sti­tutes ‘a doc­tor.’ This includes: how doc­tor-patient inter­ac­tions are medi­at­ed through tech­nolo­gies that replace the somat­ic work of the doc­tor in a clin­ic, reshap­ing the clin­i­cal encounter; how patients increas­ing­ly turn to infor­mal prac­ti­tion­ers that define cure by the alle­vi­a­tion of symp­toms rather than dis­ease; how pub­lic health mod­els inten­si­fy stan­dard­ized treat­ment pro­to­cols and con­trol strate­gies with the help of semi-pro­fes­sion­als; how doc­tors them­selves must mobi­lize cul­tur­al forms to estab­lish rela­tion­ships of trust with patients, draw­ing upon reli­gion, nation­al­ism, polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies, and more, in order to main­tain patients’ sup­pli­ca­tion to their bio­med­ical author­i­ty; and, how struc­tures of inequal­i­ty restrict and enable patient-bio­med­i­cine-doc­tor relationships. 

Please con­tact: robert.smith@GRADUATEINSTITUTE.CH