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Re-politicising Public Health: A workshop for early career ethnographers

King’s College London, 1st and 2nd October 2018

Overview

This two-day workshop invites participants to interrogate how ethnographic research can lend itself to political change in health, paying close attention to methodological problems that may arise in enacting what we might call “activist scholarship”.

Confirmed keynote speakers

Ingunn Moser (VID Specialised University, Oslo)

Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield)

The call

Our point of departure is a shared concern that health related research often shies away from both discussion and engagement in political change; we are interested in disrupting this trend by drawing on ethnographic methodologies. We are particularly interested in the ways ethnographies might connect us to new and unexpected ways of influencing the world. Yet we are also acutely aware of the uneasy relationship that ethnography can have with “more direct” political work such as activism. Through critical and imaginative engagement with concepts such as impact, accountability and power, this workshop will explore how ethnographic methods can re-politicise public health research.

Our discussion will build on work that explores the role of the “activist” researcher doing ethnography; how researchers should “follow the trouble” to understand practices of power (Marcus, 1995; Graeber, 2004; Haraway, 2010). We will attempt to go beyond these discussions to look at how we can take an active positionality within the research, thinking about ethnography as both process and product. How do ethnographers and ethnographies act, not just in the world, but “on the world” (Singleton and Law, 2013)

Zooming in from these big questions, we seek to explore a number of questions relating to different elements of the research process, such as: the power researchers have over how they engage with and represent participants; the difficulties of uncovering an underlying meaning or ideological narrative behind people’s everyday actions; and how to maintain trust in disseminating critical research. Specific questions of interest are:

1. How does the research question and methodological design either propagate or reduce inequalities in the area of research?
2. How active or passive should we be when in the field? What does it mean to actively ‘intervene’ in our ethnographic encounters?
3. What kind of relationship do we as researchers have with participants, and how can we disrupt persistent power imbalances within data generating practices?
4. How might we negotiate or disturb tensions between traditional conceptualisations of ‘impact’ and ethnographic commitments to complexity?

Participants

We invite participants (doctoral students, post-doctoral and self-defining early career researchers) to discuss these themes in a range of different fieldwork settings focusing on health and inequality, broadly defined. We welcome perspectives from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, geography, history and more.

Organisers

The workshop is organised by Hannah Cowan, Natassia Brenman (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and Charlotte Kühlbrandt (King’s College London), with the support of Professor Simon Cohn and Professor Christopher McKevitt who will be our discussants. The Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness has generously provided funding for the workshop.

Outputs

This workshop follows the success of the 2015 “Ethnographies and Health” workshop, which sparked the creation of a network of early career academic researchers which continues to forge connections across the social sciences. The workshop offers participants the opportunity to join the network.

We anticipate a high-profile publication composed of selected papers from the workshop, as well as capturing our politicising contribution to the network through online platforms (i.e. Somatosphere, who has welcomed our proposed report, and our organiser’s blog, Disruptive Inequalities).

Format

We envisage a small workshop, capped at 20 presentations.

Prior to the event, we will organise a buddying feedback system, whereby delegates will be asked to read the paper of another delegate in advance. At the workshop itself, delegates will be asked to briefly comment on their buddy’s paper, before opening up the floor for further questions. The sharing of these short papers will help ensure that it is a productive and supportive experience for everyone involved.

Two keynote speakers will open each day with reflections on their own experience of politicising ethnographic research. Each participant will then have 10 minutes to present without slides, followed by a discussion. We particularly encourage unconventional forms of presentation or alternative visual material.

Attendance

Attendance is free of any cost to invited participants. Lunch and refreshments will be provided on both days, and there will be a networking and social event on the evening of the 1st October. Five small bursaries of £75 will be available as contributions towards travel and accommodation costs for delegates with limited funding for attending workshops. Please indicate when you submit your abstract if you wish to be considered for a bursary and why.

Abstract submission

Abstracts should be submitted as a Word document to ethnographies.health.2018@gmail.com, no later than the 30th June and should not exceed 250 words, excluding title. Please also include your title, your position and institution, and pick out 3-5 key words or phrases (not included in the word count) to focus our attention to themes and issues you are most interested in discussing. We will notify you if your abstract is successful by the end of July. If accepted, we will ask you to submit a short written version of your paper in advance of the workshop (mid September), to be shared with another delegate as described above.