Thorny Matters: Health politics in between ethics, law and life in South-West Asia and North Africa 

Histories of contentious health phenomena have struggled to escape a focus on the formal bioethical deliberations and disputes within and between legal and medical institutions. Moreover, such histories often remain entrenched in frameworks of ‘metropole-periphery’. In our increasingly precarious times, it seems more crucial than ever to think about healthscapes as fluid, interconnected sites shaped by, and shaping, flows of people, concepts, technologies and commodities, at local, regional, and planetary scales. Understanding health phenomena means thinking more deeply, too, about multiplicities of knowledge and experience, and the often informal, or private, manners of their expression and exchange. These represent ontological and pragmatic challenges. They arise not only in definitions of wellness and crisis, but in pursuits of wellbeing that are navigated as ‘thorny matters’ within and between various domains of life – such as the clinic, the courtroom, the laboratory, the family, the legislature, the school room, the bedroom, and the street.

This workshop seeks to address these matters with a geo-cultural focus on South-West Asia and North Africa and associated diasporas across the globe, where such issues have been understudied in the recent decade of revival in the Medical Humanities and Social Sciences. This focus on a region that can be viewed as a ‘laboratory’ for understanding relationships between ethics and religion, law and (geo)politics, as well as lived experience, promises to break new ground for thinking about health phenomena.