Without Borders? The Future of Global Health and Transnational Humanitarianism

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Global health is a cheerful term. It conjures images of a healthy planet and people, speedy cross-border collaboration and medical innovation: a vision of pan-human wellness. But underlying global health are the spectres of global risk and global illness; jet-speed pandemics; networked dependencies and cascading crisis: the pathogenicity of globalisation. Just as global health captures the imagination, so transnational humanitarianism occupies a central place in contemporary rhetoric and governance. Humanitarian action has become a de facto model for global crisis response. The problematisation of “the future” as one of planetary crisis has been met with anticipatory action. Where Homo sapiens is a scientific category, “the human” and “humanity” are social and political designations, subject to re-negotiation. Attempts to redefine the human—and potential tiers of humanity—are visible in phenomena as diverse as the resurgence of ethno-nationalism, the response to the global migrant and refugee crisis, new genetic technologies, and in posthumanist and transhumanist discourse.

This panel questions the Anthropocenic futures of global health and transnational humanitarianism: how emerging science, technology and morality might play out in entangled health and humanitarian crises. Coordinating a diverse array of scholars and themes, the panel seeks to enliven and extend STS discourse on technology, ethics, ecology and health, particularly in the global South.

How will evolving health and humanitarian technologies respond to, and anticipate planet-wide social, ecological and political upheaval? What are the performative effects of rendering the future omnipresent? And, in the age of transhumanity, will there be a trans-humanitarianism?

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Without borders? The future of global health and transnational humanitarianism

Individual Presentations

• Anticipating Catastrophe: Health Systems Strengthening Refashioned as Innovative Pandemic Preparedness - Marlee Tichenor, University of Edinburgh

• Microbial Menaces: Calculating, Imagining, And Performing Potential Pandemic Futures - Meike Wolf, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Towards Planetary Health: From Pandemic Epicenters to Global Environmental Risk Models - Lyle Fearnley, Singapore University of Technology and Design

• Topologies of Humanitarian Attention. Recruiting Patients Accross Borders for Reconstructive Surgery in Amman - Evan Fisher, CSI, Mines-ParisTech

• Cartographic Citizenship: An Ethnography of Humanitarian Mapping - Darryl Stellmach

Session Organizers

• Darryl Stellmach

• Marlee Tichenor, University of Edinburgh