The workshop series Comparative Histories of Medicine and Health in the Global South is supported by the Center for Science and Society and the Global History of Science Reseach Cluster and it aims to bring together a community of students and faculty wanting to share their ongoing work and interested in becoming familiar with both classic and cutting-edge studies in the social history of medicine, healing and public health in the South, and to explore the politics of knowledge, debates around bodies, disease and development, growth and expertise that have informed global health history. It is supported by Faculty member Kavita Sivaramakrishnan.
Our workshop series focuses on the social and cultural histories of medicine, health and development in the global South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special emphasis on the periods of decolonization and postcolonial state building. We are interested in deepening interdisciplinary approaches, and in thinking about intersecting and linked transregional studies and historical movements. We hope that our meetings will offer a space for debate and exchange to help students and faculty refine their ideas and writing; and to develop intellectual tools that aim to address questions relating to medicine, health and society historically, and also to address contemporary questions. We will draw mainly from history, anthropology, and post-colonial studies to discuss such questions as: how medicine and health affected society and how society has in tum shaped them; how the definition of medicine and models of health and well-being have been extended and translated through transregional/ transnational knowledge exchanges; as well as how medical theories, ideas, and practices mobilize and adapt to local circumstances. An important focus of interest is also to share knowledge and approaches to sources and archives, and to discuss the challenges of researching and writing histories across and between regions, boundaries and interlinked scales.
This meeting will feature Professor Hans Pols from the University of Sydney.
What will we discuss?
- Work/chapters in progress
- Read new research publications and books, revisiting and renewing ‘older’ debates in history of medicine, exploring gaps and silences in perspectives, spaces and subjects
- Invite faculty and experts to join to debate and discuss a set of debates or themes in HOM literature. What do histories of medicine and health in the south need to consider and analyze today and in the future? Are there new ethical questions that need to be raised in history of medicine and health? What are the new intellectual agenda and 'big' and lasting questions around HOM that are emerging and what are existing challenges and gaps, and what can we learn from other fields? Is there a coherence to newer historical approaches and borrowings in history of medicine and global health, and how and where does the field need to move and develop? What are the continuing challenges that we face both conceptually and methodologically in thinking of "boundary crossing" questions (across time, national boundaries etc.)?
Please contact Sohini Chattopadhyay ([email protected]), Thomas B. Zuber ([email protected]), and Dongxin Zou ([email protected]) with any questions.
Other dates in this series include October 26, November 16, and December 17.
