The Politics of Health Conference

Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society hosts “The Politics of Health,” a two-day conference that explores political exigencies of health in the US and around the world. The conference, held October 3 and 4, in Nashville, Tennessee, invites participants and attendees with a range of experiences, priorities, and backgrounds, to a conversation about the paradoxes and the promises of health.  The conference is free and open to one-and-all.

Health is a political object par excellence: everyone agrees on its fundamental importance. Yet there is widespread disagreement about what health consists of, who needs it, and how we can equitably share its benefits. American politicians and communities spent the last two years arguing over whether a national healthcare system was a moral necessity or an egregious governmental overreach. The business of health has made a dizzying array of technologies and treatments available across the globe, but as a result health has also morphed into a commodity available only to some. Political, social and environmental issues—war, gun control, climate change, food security, discrimination—are increasingly understood in terms of their health effects, but their practical and social dimensions remain no less complex. Health is not just a state to strive for or a quantity we can posses, but a lens that reveals contention, suffering, and the possibility of better lives. Health, that is to say, is political.

The conference is organized around a series of interlinked themes that speak to the scale, urgency and intimacy of health as a political problem: inequality, infrastructure, justice, and aesthetics.  A panel on justice and activism will consider the possibilities for health justice in settings of scarce money, time and attention.  A panel on aesthetics and infrastructures will examine how seemingly distant economic and legal decisions about health are materialized in our everyday physical, social, and natural environments.  And a panel on the social foundations of health will take on the persistent causes and consequences of health disparities. By opening the discussion to practitioners, scholars, activists, students, and community members, we aim to address health issues as they are now understood by a wide variety of stakeholders: not as a condition or an abstract object, but as an ongoing political project.

The conference is free and open to the public.  Follow  www.vanderbilt.edu/mhs for up-to-date
programmatic and logistical information, including information about travel,
lodging, and venue.

 

 

 

 

Pages