Submit your abstract here!
Submission Deadline: April 4th 2022 (**deadline extended: April 11th 2022**)

13th MAYS Annual Meeting: 22-24 August 2022,

Anthropological Approaches to Healthcare Crisis

The pandemic has brought into stark focus many of the deep fractures of inequality in the societies we live in. Thus, they often require an adaptive and reflexive methodological toolkit for dealing with them. Anthropology has long proven to be capable of providing in-depth insides into such crises, or even foretelling them. Yet its messages remain on the margins of social action and are hardly heeded. It might seem importune, but crisis situations are particularly rich for a social study and for drawing attention to otherwise taken-for-granted social structures. Therefore, it is not uncommon for anthropologists to study and write around these crises. There is, however, not yet a definite concept for the crisis in anthropological literature (Beck and Knecht 2016 ). Anthropology has contributed much qualitative empirical research on natural as well as man-made disasters, risk perception, and security management, global medical problems, and humanitarian interventions (Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010; Fortun, 2001, 2014; Hoffmann, 2002; Lakoff, 2008, 2010; Oliver‐Smith, 1996) without granting a key position to the crisis in itself.

This year MAYS is looking forward to exploring crises, especially those regarding healthcare. We are looking for papers that can contribute to a stronger theoretical conceptualization of crisis. How do medical anthropologists think about the crisis? How do they methodologically approach such a healthcare crises? How do caregivers, medical professionals, patients, and other institutional workers provide and survive through such crises? How are healthcare crises managed? What are some of the preparatory measures and the methods through which these have been communicated effectively?

In 2021 we are dedicating the Annual MAYS Meeting to an issue that we see as pressing to all of social sciences in the post/pandemic times. As such, we encourage submissions from graduate students and early-career scholars in medical anthropology and related fields, as well as from those who locate themselves at the periphery, but were forced by the circumstances to engage with health-related social sciences.

The meeting will be held in Utrecht in a hybrid format. Provisional dates for the meeting are August 22 to 24.

Process

We invite reflexive, ethnographic and/or theory oriented papers that answer questions around:

  • Management of crisis situations, f.e. quantification, factors, measures, 
  • low vaccination rates, vaccine inequality,
  • health policy implementation,
  • grassroot healthcare strategies,
  • systemic healthcare malfunctions,
  • political aspects of healthcare systems, such as privatization of public healthcare services globally,
  • commercialization of health services.

We invite you to submit an abstract of no more than 350-500 words at this link by April 11th , 2022. After the notification of acceptance (April 18th), you will be asked to submit a paper of no more than 3,000 words by July 4th, 2022.

Submission HERE

Revised Deadline for Abstract Submission: April 11th, 2022
Notification of Acceptance: April 18th, 2022
Deadline for Paper Submission: July 4th, 2022

Format 

Each workshop participant will be paired with a discussant with whom they will share their paper prior to the meeting. MAYS Annual Meetings usually consist of the conference part and the workshop part; this year, due to the pandemic, we decided to test a new format and hold workshops separately over a span of few months – more information of MAYS Methods Workshops will soon follow.

The event will, most likely, be hybrid – combining both the online and the offline, if the circumstances allow.

Participation fee

As with previous meetings, there will be a registration fee of 20 Euros to contribute towards the costs of coffee breaks and lunch. We kindly ask you to pay the fee in cash upon arrival. 

As we are planning for the event to be a hybrid one, we will try to provide travel reimbursements to all EASA members taking part in the Annual Meeting. More information pending on availability and amount of travel bursaries.

We look forward to welcoming you!

MAYS Coordinators (mays.easa@gmail.com)

Chandni Shyam, MSc Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University

Magdalena Góralska, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw

Published by MAYS