An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Mursed Alam (RACE.ED Archival Research Fellow)
Marginal Medicalities from South Asia: Colonial Biopolitics, Decolonial Aporias and Indigenous Survival Epistemes
This presentation is part of a larger project on thinking medical/ health humanities from the Global South. Recently, the emerging field of medical/ health humanities is trying to move beyond the reductionist metaphysics of evidence-based quantitative methodologies to understand issues of health and well-being from a broader framework. However, such attempts are based on Eurocentric ways of being and knowing and consequent healing-epistemologies. Approaching the issue of public health, poverty, marginality and survival ethics from a decolonial perspective, the presentation takes into account the centuries old health epistemes which evolved in once colonised countries but were systematicallymarginalised in the colonial public health policies. My project, therefore, attends to persistent debates around the conflict between traditional life style centric pre-emptive healing knowhows and sophisticated Euro-modern epistemes of therapeutic cure – an aporia that encouraged hostility to vaccines even during the Covid crisis. It traces the genealogy of this modern/indigenous pedagogic tension to colonial bio-politics of epistemic erasure. The primary focus of this presentation, therefore, is the colonial response to indigenous healing epistemes with a particular focus on India.
Keywords: Public Health, Marginal Medicality, Colonial Bio-politics, Nationalist Aporia, Indigenous Medical Epistemes
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83178441780
Passcode: Kj7gnpP4
Please note that our weekly seminars will take place in the Moot Court in the School of Law between September and December 2023.
Accessibility: https://www.accessable.co.uk/venues/old-college-north