EDCMA

Description

Health care is often expressed in value/s but how care in the context of health is valued and the processes of such valuing need to be analysed critically. Following Lisa Stevenson (2014:3), we aim to conceive of care as “the way someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the other who matters,” which allows us to divorce practices of care from assumed good intentions and investigate closely the different ways in which individuals come to matter to institutions, governments, research projects, and so on. What are the practices of ethics in the production and enactment of value through care and in health care institutions?

The symposium will be addressing the question: How might looking at the valuing of care or the ethics of practices of care in different contexts help us delve more carefully into the work that care does?

In this first co-sponsored workshop from the Centre for Biomedicine, Self, and Society (CBSS) and the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA), we hope to gather to discuss these questions through the different disciplinary lenses of sociology, history, and anthropology. We will engage with the concept of care in discussion of seven presentations, and we aim to foster sustained communication and collaboration around the medical humanities and the social sciences of health within different  communities at the University.