EDCMA

Description

Join Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology for a workshop with Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz and Professor Natasha Iskander.

Combining Discourse and Practice

Monday 25 July, 14:00 – 16:00 BST

Via Zoom

In the second of our 2022 workshops we are thrilled to bring together two leading researchers of mobility and migration studies, Dr. Ann-Christin Zuntz (Edinburgh) and Professor Natasha Iskander (New York).

We are hoping to initiate discussions with our audience on how epidemic temporalities have impacted migration and mobility studies and how we can explore the practices using a variety of different research methods.

We are specifically interested in how epidemics can uncover severe health disparities, how the movement of people across borders create and/or impact existing conditions, but also, how do we extract this knowledge as researchers and what do we do with it? What happens next? How do we respond to such information in our research discourse and practice that may both capture and reflect such narratives?

 

***Important - please note:

Attendees will be asked to come having read two suggested readings for better engagement purposes.

• Zuntz, Ann-Christin. et al. (2022) Syrian refugee labour and food insecurity in Middle Eastern agriculture during the early COVID‐19 pandemic. International Labour Review. [Online] 161 (2), 245–266.
• Iskander, N. (2020) Qatar, the Coronavirus, and Cordons Sanitaires: Migrant Workers and the Use of Public Health Measures to Define the Nation. Medical anthropology quarterly. [Online] 34 (4), 561–577. 

If you have any issues accessing the articles please email s2134847@ed.ac.uk or s1451881@ed.ac.uk and request a copy.

 

Mobility and epidemics 2022 workshop overview

Our 2022 theme, “Mobility and Epidemics,” is centred on questions at the heart of medical anthropology's relationship to migration: we are specifically interested in discussing how epidemics can uncover severe health disparities, and the effects they have on intimate and collective political forms of relatedness.

How have epidemic temporalities impacted migration and mobility studies? What promises and possibilities do different research methods hold in exploring everyday migration practices across the globe? How do we as researchers encounter the limits of our expertise?

Over two sessions we will aim to discuss questions of how we respond to the information we collect in our research discourse and practice that may enable us to better illuminate the questions of movement, surveillance, space, temporality and belonging, risk, labour and healthcare bias embedded in medical systems across the globe.

Visit the Eventbrite for the first part of our 2022 workshop series, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Keynote with Seth M. Holmes.

 

Speaker bios

Dr Ann-Christin Zuntz

Dr Ann Zuntz is a lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh. As an economic and political anthropologist, she looks at the intersections between forced migration and global capitalism: she studies refugees’ mobilities and other types of circulations that position displaced people at the heart of global economies. Since 2015, Ann has done ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Jordan, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Tunisia, and remotely with Syrian farmworkers all over the Middle East, including inside Syria. At the University of Edinburgh, Ann is a member of the interdisciplinary OneHealthFIELD Network. Together with British academics and displaced Syrian agricultural scientists, she explores the role of refugee labour in Middle Eastern agriculture, and how Syrian agricultural expertise can inform sustainable development solutions to the interconnected challenges of climate change and forced migration.

Natasha N. Iskander

Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights, with more than 30 articles and book chapters on these topics. Her first book, Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico (Cornell University Press, ILR imprint, 2010), looked at the ways that migrant workers transformed the economic development policies of their countries of origin. Her forthcoming book, Does Skill Make Us Human?: Migrant Workers in 21st Century Qatar and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines the use of skill categories to define political personhood, in ways that have become increasingly salient with the hardening borders and the pressures of climate change.