School of Social and Political Science

Description

Modern medicine is an integral part of people’s daily lives, subjectivities, and the political economy in many parts of the world. It has also long become a globalized enterprise. In my talk, I will be paying attention to those aspects of medicine that are often overlooked if medicine is primarily conceived of as treatment or cure: environmental impact, labour, and extractive operations. Paying attention to these more-than-medical aspects of medicine allows novel perspectives on its globe-spanning relations and unequally distributed effects. It is a way to comprehend medicine in late industrialism as an ever expanding and at the same time exhausted material and extractive enterprise, predicated on sick and worn-out bodies and environments, and yet indispensable for health as it is hegemonically understood. What shall medical anthropologists make of such aporias? And what can medical critique be today?