1. Eram Alam,
In Search of Care: Scenes from the US/Mexico Border (
[email protected])
2. Claire Edington, "A War Inside a War: Fighting Drug Addiction During the Decolonization of Vietnam" ([email protected])
3. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan,
From Russia, with Love: The Promise of Indo-Soviet Medical Cooperation and Assistance in Postcolonial India (
[email protected])
What does it mean when countries open borders and resources for scientific exchanges and cooperation, care and treatment, and in turn, like today, when these historic moments and ‘openings’ end or close? This panel brings together four papers to explore the mobility and immobility of medical ideas and networks in the 20th-21st century, in the context of the Cold War and post-colonial modernization, and neoliberal projects in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The papers will discuss the pathways of circulation for experts, patients, and the changing aspirations that underlay these partnerships and interactions. Just as medical networks flowed outwards, their founders also addressed internal politics and ideologies, such as interpreting the value of science and socialism; and they were compelled to confront domestic, political rivalries. What did these exchanges represent for hosts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and what insights does it offer us on ‘Cold War medicine’ as a diverse and fluid, even contradictory project? How were foreign medical research and technological aid understood and justified in the newly decolonized nations, and what vocabularies and discourses were deployed? How do these networks and collaborations with socialist physicians recast 'western' tropes about backward medical 'peripheries' and developed, 'centers,' that were pervasive in aid discourses with the US ? These medical networks offer us crucial narratives regarding innovation and self-reliance; and how experts, publics, and patients interacted, and also debates regarding emerging medical markets for care. Our panel will look at the 'afterlives' of medical networks in a neoliberal context when markets and consumer choices lead to patients seeking care across borders, such as between Mexico and the US. How do cultures of aid and medical exchange, also translate later through medical expertise that is marketed to patients as tourists. The papers in our panel will productively address these questions, and critically evaluate medical networks and knowledge and care in transit on border crossing ways.
