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

The workshop attended to the relational and political aspects of different spheres of meaning-making to approach health phenomena as dynamically imagined, explained and negotiated.

Studies 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 studies 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.

Papers were divided into four thematic strands:

Chronic Relationships and Social Life

• Nishanth Kunnukattil Shaji and Nick Surawy Stepney – Contested palliations: Morphine’s lived reality within a palliative care social movement in Kerala, India
• Maziyar Ghiabi – Screens or Crystals? Visual storytelling on addiction to smartphones and methamphetamines in rural Iran

The Community of Loss and Care

• Kali Rubaii – “Is it becoming a tradition that mothers hold their dead sons?”: Enduring Health Impacts of Military Violence in Iraq
• Tara Asgarilaleh – Making Sense of a Loss: Masculinities, Reproductive Emotions, and Affective Economies of IVF
• Hanna Kienzler (co-authors Suzan Mitwalli and Yoke Rabaia) – Neighbourhood Safety and Mental Health in Palestine: Navigating Violence, Stigma, and Care

The Legal Body

• Ahmad Moradi – Tinkering with Loss: Experiments in Injury and Damaged Life in Iran
• Hannah Cowdell – Contradicting realities: The ‘nature’ of sex in Lebanese gender recognition cases 1987-1992

Contagion and Care

• Hanan Hammad – Families of Tuberculosis: A Hidden History of Egyptian Feminism
• Samin Rashidbeigi – The Leper, the Kind Siblings, the Generous Landlady, and the Poet: Competing Modes of Leprosy Care in Iran (1960s–1970s)

The workshop keynote was given by Lara Sheehi, on the topic of ‘Psychic Militancy in Service of Revolutionary Futures.’

The outcome of the workshop will be a special issue.

Thorny Matters was funded by an SSHM Conference Award, an SWDTP ESRC collaboration fund, and the Wellcome Trust-funded project Living Addiction in States of Disruption.