Infrastructures of Health

April 5-6, 2025

Purbasha Mazumdar, IHEID

Robert Dean Smith, IHEID

Prof. Aditya Bharadwaj, IHEID

Prof. Lenore Manderson, University of the Witwatersrand, SA and Monash University, Melbourne, AU

The ongoing contention with the Anthropocene has made questions of infrastructures-the aspirations they encode and the possibilities they make (un)available-explicitly political. The COVID-19 pandemic made starkly evident not only the brittleness of our extant infrastructures of health but also the emergence and malleability of novel infrastructures of surveillance and care. Taking a cue from these growing empirical riddles the workshop will offer the rubric of infrastructures of health in order to critically examine how infrastructures-as sites of political, affective and economic investment- animate the possibilities of and the aspirations to health.

Both infrastructure and health are capacious concepts that defy easy attempts at definitionalstability, and are realised within situated contexts. Infrastructure, which in its broadest sense signals structural edifice, includes both material and immaterial objects-masks, ambulances, nurses, electricity, hospitals, medical knowledge and (dis-)information, affects etc.-and networks of their dissemination. Critical scholarship on infrastructures emerged from conversations that sought to draw our attention to the embedded entities that shape our navigation of everyday life (Star and Ruhleder 1996). By bringing infrastructures in conversation with health allows us ask questions about the material and immaterial underpinnings of our aspirations of being and becoming healthy-health, understood here, not just as a non-pathological state of being but also a material-aspirational pursuit.

The focus on infrastructures of health aims to provide a space for discussions that may not seem immediately evident to (bio)medical healthcare; doing so will facilitate a more holistic appraisal of health and an empirically supported revisiting of its vital stakes. By bringing these two concepts together we wish to highlight an array of problematics this conceptual coupling pushes forward-such as, the play of the material and immaterial and the shifting assemblages of human and nonhuman actors in the aspirations to health, the ways in which health and its stakes are made (in)visible through the failure and functioning of infrastructures, the ways in which health circulates as an aspiration and is made manifest. How does a focus on infrastructures alter our understanding of and investments in health? How and in what ways is the ambit of health displaced or re-defined through these considerations? How can we better understand the rampant inequalities in accessing and maintaining health through a focus on its infrastructures and its infra-structuring? 

This module will benefit students and scholars who are engaged in thinking about health and its stakes in the contemporary. 

Saas Almagell

Participation fee: CHF 60 

For students of the CUSO universities (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg) and from the universities of Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Basel and St. Gallen, accommodation and meals are organised and covered by the CUSO doctoral program in anthropology. 

Travel expenses will be reimbursed via MyCUSO based on half-fare train ticket (2nd class) from the student's university to the place of the activity.

15