Medicine Anthropology Theory is an English-language, fully open access journal published with Edinburgh Diamond at the University of Edinburgh. We publish Research Articles, Field Notes, and Review Essays in medical anthropology, the anthropology of biomedicine, critical global health studies, medical humanities, and science and technology studies.
Special Section/Special Issue Submission
Copyright (c) 2025 Kelly Fagan Robinson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial for the Spring issue, 2025.
Copyright (c) 2025 Editorial Collective https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Health-Related Expertise in the Digital Age:​ Reconfigurations and Redistributions
Special Issue "​​Health-Related Expertise in the Digital Age:​ Reconfigurations and Redistributions", guest edited by <span class="NormalTextRun SCXW69776123 BCX0" data-ccp-parastyle="Author(s)" data-ccp-parastyle-defn="{"ObjectId":"d1787508-301d-48f5-8fc9-b6712b0303d7|27","ClassId":1073872969,"Properties":[201342446,"1",201342447,"5",201342448,"1",201342449,"1",469777841,"Arial",469777842,"Arial",469777843,"Calibri",469777844,"Arial",201341986,"1",469769226,"Arial",268442635,"28",469775450,"Author(s)",201340122,"2",134234082,"true",134233614,"true",469778129,"Authors",335572020,"4",335551500,"5855577",335551547,"1033",469777462,"425,709",469777927,"0,0",469777928,"1,1",335559740,"264",201341983,"0",335551550,"3",335551620,"3",469778324,"Normal"]}">Sandra Bärnreuther, Nolwenn Bühler and Giada Danesi.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sandra Bärnreuther, Nolwenn Buhler, Giada Danesi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Normative Language and Judgements of Cognition: A Methodological Reflection on Difficult Sign Language Interactions
In this article, I investigate the case of a deaf woman, Silivia, who lived in western Uganda. Silivia did not use standardised sign language and was commonly considered to be ‘mad.’ However, some of her interlocutors disagreed, arguing that perceptions of madness arose because those around Silivia did not invest enough in attempting to communicate with her. I use experiential and analytical reflection on the methodological challenges of working with Silivia to explore what difficult moments tell us about how communication and everyday assessments of cognitive function are mutually implicated for deaf people in Uganda. Adopting a theoretical approach that understands languaging as a collective or distributed process, I argue that comprehensibility is not something that is determined by the qualities of a person’s expression, but rather something that happens to and through communication, mediated through social and environmental constraints. These include normative linguistic ideologies and frames of comprehensibility that may encode ableist expectations (for example, that ‘good’ communication is quick and efficient). In this context, I argue, interpretative difficulties that arise in the use of less conventionalised forms of visual languaging make some deaf people particularly subject to stigmatisation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Julia Modern https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Giving voice’ can be an empowering metaphor for the process of creating space for another’s perspective, allowing for their experience to be noted and attended to. Yet it is also a metaphor that relies on a particular form of articulation. Voice and narrative share many of the same strengths and limitations: for some, they are powerful tools of sense making and communication; but for others they can elude important forms of experience and fail to capture many of the more inchoate aspects of lived life in general. What happens in those moments when words fail, or are simply absent? In addressing this question via fieldwork in a community space in Osaka, I explore how silence can constitute an affective space of care. Shared silences are felt in their duration, the passing of time brings them about. In these contexts, silence is not merely an absence, but an index of presence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Iza Kavedžija https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Psychoactive Agents​: Drugs, Morality, and Responsibility
Special Section Introduction
Copyright (c) 2024 Neil Carrier, Guntars Ermansons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Seeking Knowledge in and for Troubled Times: The Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, MAT, and a Shared Vision
Editorial for the September Issue, 2024
Copyright (c) 2024 Editorial Collective https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Emma Kowal’s Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity (2023) investigates the history of biological and medical research about Indigenous peoples in Australia. This book forum invited contributors to provide nuanced insights that engage the book’s central contributions to debates in medical anthropology about decoloniality and racial science. Bringing together medical historians, anthropologists, and scholars of science and technology Trevor Engel, Beth Greenhough, Frederic Keck, and Ros Williams, the forum’s contributors highlight the profound utility of Kowal’s insights and the necessity of attending to the spectral presence of the colonial-era ghosts that haunt the ground on which contemporary biological science, including genetics and epigenetics, is practised. The forum contributors draw out the multivalent affects that ghosts provoke, brought to presence through Kowal’s ethnographic observations and rich archival research. They engage ghostly characters like British scientist Baldwin Spencer, who sits out of sight but not out of mind in a museum storeroom, and surgeon and Australian anatomist Sir William Colin Mackenzie, who haunts the dreams of Goenpul Indigenous filmmaker Romaine Moreton. Each contributor shows the productive tension gained by following Kowal’s directive to listen to these and other ghosts around us, and gesture towards the possibilities of decolonial scientific practices.
Copyright (c) 2025 Trevor Engel, Beth Greenhough, Frederic Keck, Ros Williams, Meredith Evans, Benjamin Hegerty, Emma Kowal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reckless Local and Ill-Fated Stranger: Reimagining Vietnamese National Sentiment during COVID-19
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam, the media has meticulously covered disease prevention and reported on infection cases. This article will explore the current and shifting gender relations of Vietnam’s state and societal expectations by comparing Patient 17, a female Vietnamese citizen, and Patient 91, a British male pilot. While Patient 91 has received sympathy and international acclaim, Patient 17 has been heavily criticised and shunned from Vietnamese society. Through these case studies, I seek to understand how individual patient cases reflect the nuances of nationalism in Vietnam and how online citizens interpret the quintessential traits of Vietnamese character. Drawing on media analyses from an online news outlet, I delve into themes of media representation, gender, class, and race. By exploring how media coverage and online commentators shape perceptions of these patients, I aim to shed light on how patient stories can transcend individual experiences and become emblematic of broader societal ideals.
Copyright (c) 2025 Shani Tra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
​​Against Image Positivism​: The Potentials for Play as a Mode of Health Research
Images are increasingly used in health research as a complement to discursive methods, to elicit more and different types of knowledge and experience from participants. The use of image-based research, such as drawing and photography, then, holds promises for understanding health in new ways. However, such promises fall short when researchers and audiences treat images as realist representations of participants’ lives. Images are never clear representations of an objective reality- this is not their value either during or after research. In this photo essay, we show and discuss how we countered image positivism in the PHRAME study, Photographing Health by Rural Adolescents in the Midwest. The photos shown in this essay take viewers into our interviews in PHRAME and then out to our modes of audience engagement. Throughout, play served as a critical orientation and form of listening. We show this, first, through glimpses into our interviews, where we engaged in play that transformed meanings of photos taken by the young people. Then we show how we engaged public health, academic audiences, and popular audiences of the young people’s photos in play where audiences were invited to co-produce meaning through interactive activities, rather than reading to extract meaning from the photos. In conclusion, we suggest that play as a mode of research and exchange holds transformative potential, taking health research beyond the image positivism that has constrained the methodology to expand visions of what health is and might be.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jean Hunleth, Sienna Ruiz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Uncertainty, disavowal, forgetting, and stigmatisation are common responses to toxicity: dumping grounds are habitually portrayed as ‘strange, alien spaces with no comprehensive histories’ (Little and Akese 2024). How can we best face this strangeness? What are the methodological and theoretical tools we would need to do so? Three recent volumes offer provocations for anthropologists of toxicity from phenomenological, activist, and heritage management standpoints.
Copyright (c) 2025 Elena Sobrino https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Of Ethnographic (Mis)Translations on a Ward
<span class="NormalTextRun SCXW236738553 BCX0" data-ccp-charstyle="None" data-ccp-charstyle-defn="{"ObjectId":"1d2bf20b-323c-490d-8a8c-107ee838ff2b|178","ClassId":1073872969,"Properties":[469775450,"None",201340122,"1",134233614,"true",469778129,"None",335572020,"1",469777841,"Times New Roman",469777842,"Times New Roman",469777843,"Arial Unicode MS",469777844,"Times New Roman",469769226,"Times New Roman,Arial Unicode MS"]}">In this Field Note, I take the opportunity to reflect on some of the concrete dilemmas that I was faced with in trying to negotiate, secure and maintain access to my field-site. These reflections derive from my engagement with infectious diseases physicians, at a renowned corporate tertiary care hospital in Southern India, who are working towards mitigating antibiotic/antimicrobial resistance. By drawing on the difficulties of felicitously translating my concerns, as an ethnographer, to the epistemological universe that animated (but did not wholly determine) my site of investigation allows me to think through what might or might not emerge as strategically useful in the varied loci that anthropologists are increasingly engaged with.
Copyright (c) 2025 Purbasha Mazumdar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
UK Khat Prohibition and the Making of a Harmful Drug
This article delves into the complex dynamics of khat (Catha edulis) prohibition in the UK, with a particular focus on a Somali community in north-west London. Despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs finding no substantial evidence of khat causing societal or medical harms and recommending public health interventions instead of prohibition, the UK Home Office classified khat as a Class C drug in June 2014. This decision raises critical questions about what constitutes a harmful drug. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during the peak of prohibition discourse in 2013–14, the article explores how notions of harm operate across moral, political, and epistemological registers as people grapple with framing khat’s drug status and the effects of its use. It illustrates how prohibition discourse not only amplified perceptions of khat’s harmfulness but also sidelined the more nuanced concerns of Somali community members over persistent socioeconomic integration issues, mental health, and social marginalisation. Thus, the harm of khat may not lie in its potency as a psychoactive substance but as an object of prohibition that overshadows interventions to address the adverse conditions associated with its use among certain individuals.
Copyright (c) 2024 Guntars Ermansons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Health Data Saves Lives’, But Which Lives?: The Non-Imagination of Ecological Peril in Precision Medicine
Precision medicine is a field of future promise. Its imaginary is that ‘health data saves lives’. But which lives and at what costs? In this position piece, we direct attention to how non-imagination (Prainsack 2022) operates in the field of precision medicine. We argue that central actors in the field, along with social scientists researching it, non-imagine the relevance of environmental collapse to the pursuit of precision medicine, despite its huge energy consumption and focus on prolonging human lives in places that contribute the most to climate change. This non-imagination raises questions about how we as medical anthropologists approach and theorise the ‘life politics’ at the centre of anthropological studies of the life sciences. In light of the current ecological peril, we advocate for extending the discipline’s focus from the governance of life in politics, labs, and clinics to the governance of ‘earth-life’.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mette N. Svendsen, Olivia Spalletta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Role of Affective Labour in Expertise: Bringing Emotions Back into Expert Practices
In recent years, a lot of scholarly attention has been devoted to how practices of digitalisation and datafication require medical professionals to work together with different stakeholders, and to how such collaborations shape expertise (Stevens, Wehrens, and de Bont 2020; Carboni et al. 2024). STS scholars have generally approached expertise as an epistemic and social endeavor, but they have tended to neglect the role affects and emotions play in its development and performance. In this paper, we provide a theoretical reflection on the relation between affective labour and expertise building upon Egher’s (2023) conceptualisation of expertise as a practical achievement realised through coordination and affective labour. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in various medical settings, including digital pathology, psychiatry, and datafication in intensive care, we explore what types of affective labour are conducted in digital healthcare, by whom, and with what consequences. We show how affective labour mediates both epistemic and relational practices. We argue that different affects and emotions are mobilised in these practices, which impacts the development and effective performance of expertise.
Copyright (c) 2025 Claudia Egher, Chiara Carboni, Rik Wehrens https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Making Visible the Expertise of Data Workers in AI-Driven Healthcare: A Call to Action
Data constitute a crucial resource in healthcare systems increasingly reliant on digital technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI). However, before these technologies can be used, they need to be ‘trained’ on large datasets assembled by individuals often working from home utilising their expertise to ensure that technologies work as they are designed to. Amidst recent enthusiasm for the adoption of AI in healthcare, little attention has been paid to the expertise and plight of these data workers. As I argue in this position piece, researchers have an important role to play in analysing and bringing to public attention the expertise possessed by those who curate content needed to power AI in healthcare and the affective demands and potential harms they face in undertaking this work. I discuss recent efforts to address the working conditions of data workers in general and suggest that the International Labour Organization could help develop standards, policies and programs to protect these individuals. As I conclude, making visible the expertise of data workers in healthcare will assist to both improve their lives and increase public awareness of the fact that AI would not exist without their contributions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alan R Petersen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Illness is fluid. It can cross bodily boundaries, across space and time, and permeate entire families and communities. This is especially apparent in places where people have come to rely on one another in order to withstand austerity and state disregard. Here I share a creative revision of field notes from home visits with a family living with debilitating illness in rural Guatemala. Through their experience, I contemplate how vulnerability and illness are not merely hardships to be endured but can also be conditions productive of collective action, resistance, and new forms of belonging.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jillian Moore https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Embodied Ecologies: How We Sense, Know and Act to Reduce Cumulative Chemical Exposures in Our Everyday Lives
Our worlds and lives are awash with industrially-produced chemicals. This dizzying array of chemicals includes compounds, interactions, and health effects that are poorly, if at all, understood. While the vast majority of both natural and social science research continues to focus on the toxicities of single compound or classes of compounds, we propose a theoretical and methodological framework to attend to cumulative toxicities—known, unknown, interacting and in flux—in everyday life. Our approach builds on the empirical, methodological, and theoretical work of urban political ecology (UPE), anthropology of embodiment, and science and technology studies (STS), and uses radical cartography and ethnographic methods to gain insight into urban pollution’s complex and uneven entanglements, which are inseparably chemical, social, and ecological. We are developing this approach in three phases: ethnographically attending to the sensorial experiences and embodied knowledges of those most affected; creatively and cartographically producing representations and evidence; and identifying and supporting existing modes of action and harm reduction practices. Currently transitioning between the first and second phase, here we also share fresh insights from our recently wrapped grand tours of collective explorations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anita Hardon, Tait Mandler, Mariana Rios Sandoval, Michael Tan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Pandemic and Politicisation in Argentina: Nursing Professional Trajectories in the Conurbano Bonaerense Region
The article analyses the politicisation of nursing personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina, focusing on the trajectories of nurses trained in the public universities of the so-called ‘conurbano bonaerense’, especially in the young universities of the ‘Bicentenario’, rooted in a territory with strong traditions of popular political participation. The pandemic context accelerated the struggles for professional recognition among nurses. Analysing this process constitutes a significant contribution to the social studies of health and illness in Latin America, particularly regarding the role of gender. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of making the history and demands of the nursing profession visible. Against this background, this article emphasises the challenging working conditions and lack of recognition faced by the nursing profession in Argentina, both materially and symbolically. Based on the analysis of narratives provided by nurses in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the article analyses three politicisation trajectories of nursing graduates of Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche, on the conurbano bonaerense, the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. We demonstrate the importance of the institutional context of the universities in this territory and underline its significance for the politicisation process we have observed.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Pozzio, Daniela Testa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
​​Solace of Substance​: Agency, Surrender, and Consolation in Addiction and Polydrug Use
Although preceding its association with substance use, early uses of the term ‘addiction’ signified intense attachment or ‘devotion’ to an activity or pursuit, indicating compromised autonomy, a necessary ‘culling’ of conflicting obligations, such as family and other concerns, and a potentially dangerous surrender (Lemon 2018). Recent advances in biomedical and neuroscientific understandings of addiction, as a relapsing neurological disorder, have sharpened notions of substance use as being outside of conscious control. Yet framing addiction in terms of individual, neurobiological predispositions towards addictive behaviour, continues to impact how we view agency, responsibility, and autonomy, even as substances are ascribed their own powerful agencies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with individuals and third sector services in south-east Scotland, this article attends to ambiguous notions of agency attributed to and by people who use substances, and to substances themselves. It asks how responsibility for recovery becomes divested onto individuals, and how a moral ‘devotion’ to one’s recovery is mandated by medical and judicial institutions. The article further highlights how dyadic and intimate relationships with heroin are emplaced within wider webs of relations, and how heroin itself is suffused with agency and intentionality: becoming at once a force for destruction and source of life-giving surrender.
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Roe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Potent Chew?: Kenyan Khat and the Agency of Drugs
Few other categories of things appear so bound up with questions of agency, power and responsibility as that of ‘drugs’. With over a century of global treaties and prohibition of such substances, we are accustomed to thinking of them as potent things that can hold us in their thrall. Social science approaches, in contrast, tend to downplay the agency and power of the drug itself, showing how such agency and power is distributed among wider contexts. This paper explores themes of drug power and agency through a case study of khat. While relatively weak in terms of pharmacology, khat brims with potency in how people talk about it and its effects. I argue that such talk is crucial for understanding the potency of the substance itself. This talk helps us understand how drug potency is not just a pharmacological property, but an historical, sociological and anthropological one too; such talk also acts to reinforce this potency through influencing expectations of what being ‘under the influence’ entails. Furthermore, while drug potency during moments of intoxication is fleeting, the stories of succumbing to a drug that arise from these moments have a longer-term potency as they are recounted over the years.
Copyright (c) 2024 Neil Carrier https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
​​Data on the Mind:​ How the Data on the Use of Force in Psychiatry Interacts with Professional Judgment
Psychiatric clinicians and managers increasingly use data to monitor the use of force on psychiatric patients. In this study, we describe how Danish authorities simultaneously emphasise a need for close data monitoring and tell a story of failure: rather than reducing force, they claim that data monitoring of mechanical restraint has simply replaced this type of force with other types. We show here how the official narrative of failure is based on highly selective data practices. It inadequately conveys the efforts of the psychiatric staff, with potentially negative implications for the development of clinical judgment. While the authorities and many clinicians support continued data monitoring, we argue a need to rethink the role of data in relation to force and to better appreciate how data practices affect understandings of expertise. We base our analysis on policy papers and official reports on monitoring practices in Denmark, secondary analysis of data from these monitoring practices, as well as observations from and qualitative interviews with clinical managers, administrators and clinicians. By engaging these policies and practices, we point to a need for a new form of anthropological engagement with the data politics currently shaping psychiatric expertise.
Copyright (c) 2025 Klaus Hoeyer, Anne Hoeyen Munk, Sarah Wadmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Automating Dietary Expertise: The Challenge of Making a Food-Tracking App for Everyone
Digitally tracking food and eating has become a widespread activity. Scholars in anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies have problematised the personal and social implications of dietary tracking and the metrification of food and eating. Metrification has contributed to the emergence of new types of relevant expertise and new experts of eating and health. This warrants in-depth research to better understand the forming, negotiation, establishment and effects of new expertise. Drawing on a sociomaterial perspective, this article explores these questions by reflecting on the development of an automated dietary tracking and intervention app. The article focuses on seeking feedback on mock-ups and prototypes of the app from potential users and non-users in ‘go-alongs’ and interviews, and in focus groups. The analysis revealed that the delegation of dietary expertise to an automated system poses a challenge for many participants. They emphasised what is neglected in the process—including their dietary but also bodily and sociocultural expertise. Our study contributes to an understanding of how dietary tracking and delegating expertise to an automated system appeals to users whose food values align with metrics used in the app but also users who accept to delegate specific forms of care to the technology.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giada Danesi, Tanja Schneider https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
​​Making Homes in a Nursing Facility in Athens​
This Photo Essay seeks to visualise the room-homes of the residents in one of the largest semi-public nursing homes in Athens, Greece. Unlike in other facilities, residents are given the opportunity to intervene in their individual rooms, to change and fill the space with objects from their past lives and the houses they lived in, such as furniture, curtains, carpets, computers, crockery, or flowerpots. They also bring and live through photographs of their previous lives. I focus on the room-homes people create in this nursing home, the worlds they build. I conceive this visual ethnography as an account of the process of ‘house-ing’ (Biehl and Neiburg 2021, 540), ‘charting how forms and figures of dwelling constitute the house as a sensorial archiving machine of sorts, shaping affective pasts and the stories and trajectories of tomorrow’ (2021, 544).
Copyright (c) 2024 Eirini Papadaki https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sugar, A Morally Ambiguous Substance: Responsibility, Social Class and Pleasure in Scotland’s State Primary Schools
Children’s sugar consumption has been marked out as an important area of public health policymaking in the UK, due to connections between sugar consumption, obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental decay. Yet unlike other regulated substances (alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes), ‘moderate’ or ‘responsible’ sugar consumption, rather than abstinence, is the desired policy outcome. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Edinburgh in 2018–19 in two demographically mixed Scottish state primary schools, I examine how school staff navigate this space of lenience written into state health policy—whereby some sugar can be consumed, sometimes. The public health dangers of sugar consumption, coupled with its relational pleasures (through associations with kinship, nurture and celebration) help illuminate how schools—as responsible agents—attempt to care for and govern children. It is sugar’s ambiguity, I argue, that enables it to become a crucial tool for children’s socialisation. Where and how sugar can be consumed responsibly, and which pleasures are deemed permissible or excessive, vary contextually: they are shaped through social class, and depend on the school policy being enacted. Beyond being an object to regulate, children’s pleasures in sugar are central to affective, social and class-informed practices of creating morally responsible persons.
Copyright (c) 2024 Imogen Alice Bevan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Thinking Through Voice with a Somali (Love Doctor) Poet
During research on love songs and political poetry in Somaliland, one of my closest interlocutors has been a poet named Weedhsame who describes his work as arising from a duty to ‘give voice to the voiceless’. Collaborating with a musician and singer to ‘give voice’ to otherwise mute love-sufferers, Weedhsame is revered as a ‘love doctor’ whose words provide therapeutic relief to his ‘patients’. His political maanso poems also powerfully ‘give voice’—sonically and textually—to the otherwise inaudible concerns of marginalised communities. My conversations with Weedhsame have provided me with a compelling emic perspective on what it means to ‘give voice’ to others, and the intimately social work of vocal mediation. They have also challenged me to think about my own anthropological voicing practices. In this reflection, I use my conversations with Weedhsame to consider the politics and practices of ‘giving voice’ in Somaliland, in matters of love and politics, before turning these lessons back on my own practice. I focus especially on what these practices might mean for how anthropologists gather, assemble and sound the stories and ‘voices’ of others in our work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Christina J Woolner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Psychiatric Care as an Other-than-Human Entanglement: Anthropological Reflections on Forest Therapy
What can we learn about the therapeutic landscapes of in-patient psychiatric care by focusing on the invisible, the seemingly unimportant? To explore how mental affliction and caregiving acts are connected to other-than-human dimensions and sensory experience, I analyse the role of trees and forests in a Swiss in-patient psychiatric clinic. Using ethnographic vignettes and introducing the forest as a therapeutic landscape, I discuss the role of trees in a ward’s day-to-day life, a psychiatric sufferer’s modes of self-perception in the forest, and a physiotherapist’s active ‘tinkering’. My central argument addresses a problematic element in the research on psychiatric care in Switzerland: it is largely devoid of anthropological attentiveness to sensory perception and the atmospheric. I propose an alternative view where the experiences of illness, recovery, and violence are fundamentally co-created by a sensory context—including its marginalised, nonhuman, and atmospheric dimensions—and a conceptual framework informed by an anthropological adaption of feminist notions of ‘matters of care’ as well as sensory and ecological anthropology.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Hänni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Medical Tech Facilitator: An Emerging Position in Dutch Public Healthcare and Their Tinkering Practices
This article focuses on the emerging position of the ‘medical tech facilitator’ developed by practitioners in the Dutch public healthcare system. The analysis is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Dutch hospitals. It highlights, firstly, the practices and ongoing negotiations that these facilitators engage in, to maintain a position between two parties—the medical sector and the technology industry. I argue that the practices of medical tech facilitators are not (only) a result of personal, lucrative interests, but should be seen as a pragmatic way of coping, or tinkering, with a healthcare system that is experienced by them as frustrating and inefficient. Secondly, the article reveals the outcomes of these practices for public healthcare. I will pose that this emerging and ambiguous position leads to a co-production of specific health policies—something which is concerning, considering the fact that medical tech facilitators typically lack technological expertise. As such, they both resist and reproduce the problems they experience in their daily work.
Diversity amongst Decision Makers?: Workplace Inequality, Black Underrepresentation, and the Afterlife of Colonialism in NHS Governance
Whereas senior management within NHS England was once so monocultural that it was dubbed the ‘snowy white peaks of the NHS’, recent data suggests that things have begun to change. However, Black staff in particular are still underrepresented. Interviews with Black and White NHS managers from four London trusts found that though the acronyms ‘BME’/‘BAME’ lack subtlety, management considered quantitative data important. The #BlackLivesMatter movement impacted NHS staff as a potential catalyst for change, though momentum fizzled out. Barriers to diversity and promotion have been seen to include microaggressions and negative stereotyping of Black staff. This article interrogates such underrepresentation, and uses the concept of ‘the afterlife of colonialism’ to suggest that NHS management hierarchies follow colonially-introduced hierarchies of ethnicity and discrimination, creating structural issues that are difficult to address. Taking a feminist framework of analysis, I will argue that diversity race work, including that of #BlackLivesMatter, is anti-hierarchical at its core, suggesting that it is difficult to assimilate within the hierarchically minded world of management. I will conclude that for ethnic diversity amongst staff to be realised, all staff must be committed to supporting this agenda, regardless of their race.
Synergies: The Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology, MAT, and a Shared Vision
Editorial for the April issue, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 MAT Editorial Collective