We understand healthcare systems as complex networks, comprising elements including institutions, ethical considerations, marketing strategies, clinical trials, and the labour of scientists, healthcare professionals and researchers.
Our work aims to understand the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within these networks – that is, who is considered and who isn’t – along with the mechanisms through which patients and people come to constitute health metrics. Additionally, our research explores the dissemination of clinical and disciplinary knowledge within healthcare networks and examines how these networks reinforce knowledge through activities such as monitoring, evaluation, audit and training. At multiple scales, we critically examine how the concept of health is configured as a standardised state of being.
Stephen Taylor highlights the spatially differentiated ways in which the global goal of eradication has emerged, transformed, and become institutionalised through an examination of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in Pakistan and Nigeria (funded by British Academy and Rockefeller Foundation). Kerry Holden investigated the moral and political economies of science in UK universities through an analysis of the impact of financialisation on the careers of biomedical scientists.
Ed Kiely has examined the practices through which bureaucrats create knowledge of healthcare systems under conditions of austerity. Their research theorises the affective economies that are mobilised in the process, identifying mechanisms which work to camouflage the harmful consequences of budget cuts and thereby promote further austerity.
Working with a range of non-governmental organisations (e.g. INASP in the UK and the Ugandan National Health Research Organisation), Kerry Holden’s ESRC Future Research Leader-funded research examined the uses of evidence in the Ugandan parliament. Raising questions about how knowledge practices shape political culture and promote democracy, the research reveals how civil servants and institutions achieve commensurability through the everyday enactment and performance of evidence techniques.
Collaborating with migrant assistance networks along European borders, Elizabeth Storer’s British Academy funded research explored how ethnographic evidence can better inform the generation of equitable epidemic/ pandemic health policies in times of crisis. This research has particularly focused on building alternative approaches to vaccine ‘hesitancy’ which account for the effects of historical and contemporary state abandonment.
Working alongside researchers at the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria at Amsterdam UMC, Ed Kiely has developed a groundbreaking typology of trans-specific healthcare systems across Europe. The project will enable further comparative research to explore standards of trans healthcare in different countries.