Global Medicine from the South? Emerging Markets and Indian Ocean Medical Worlds - I

Abstract

Amid ongoing debates regarding the politics and economics of global health financing and sustainability, “emerging markets” and “South-South” relations are increasingly figured as sites of medical innovation. Calls for universal health coverage have expanded public and private insurance schemes for low income patients, for instance, and new models for financing medical services have driven the expansion of private hospitals across South Asia and Africa. New communications technologies, meanwhile, have intensified possibilities for medical circulation across the Indian Ocean and within the Global South. These emerging market and technological formations are indelibly shaped by historical formations of science, technology, and politics that not only facilitate connectivity but also produce new challenges. A focus on the social and political relations that constitute Indian Ocean medical worlds draws attention to genealogies of trade, development, and foreign policy that still shape, to varying degrees, present-day ideological repertoires and geopolitical imaginings. This panel brings together interdisciplinary scholars working on longstanding and emerging forms of medical connection across the Indian Ocean. Through ethnographic work on a multiplicity of sites and scales, this panel examines how Indian Ocean connections are shaping emerging market-health formations. It explores the political and public health consequences of these linkages in such arenas as access to medicine, medical governance and biosecurity, the postcolonial politics of race, and the politics of medical expertise and labor. Ultimately, by paying attention to emerging economic, knowledge, and technopolitical formations the panel complicates dominant STS understandings of postcolonial science, including of global health and medicine.

Chair

• Mathieu Quet, IRD

Discussant

• Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Cermes3

Individual Presentations

• Data Worlds and Public Health: Model-Building in the Global South - Manjari Mahajan, New School University

• More-than-Global Health in Mozambique: The Many Transnationalisms of Medicine across the Indian Ocean - Ramah McKay, University of Pennsylvania

• A Clinical South: Speculative Markets and Epic Storytelling in the Pan-African e-Network - Vincent Duclos, Drexel University

Session Organizers

• Vincent Duclos, Drexel University

• Ramah McKay, University of Pennsylvania