"New directions in the histories of health, healing, and medicine in African contexts" to be held in South Africa (360G-Wellcome-099719_Z_12_Z)

A two-and-a-half day workshop comprising paper presentations, overviews, round-table discussions and mentoring of senior graduate students, with the following three main goals: - To bring together and establish a network of scholars working on histories of health, healing and medicine in Africa, and more especially Southern Africa. - To build research capacity of scholars, including upcoming researchers from disadvantaged backgrounds and institutions, based in Southern Africa. - To share work-in-progress and/or proposals for future workshops, research projects and publications - including with research partners at the Wellcome Trust. The timing of the workshop is sparked by a visit to South Africa by Professor David Wright (McGill University) who is the keynote speaker and his work on both mental disability and on African health-care workers in transnational medicine promise to be important for scholars across several disciplines. Other themes to be explored include: methods, methodologies, archives and ethics; healing and trauma; epidemics and epistemes; the profession of biomedicine and African doctors; healthcare workers and indigenous beliefs about illness; hospitals and local economies; healthcare, welfare and development; gender, faith, service and identity in mission hospitals; and the politics of post-apartheid health insurance and macro-policy.