Radical Health. Doing Medicine, Health Care, and Anthropology of the Good

Health and healthcare provision are an utterly complicated affair. In current times of proliferating socioeconomic inequalities, anthropogenic climate change, and environmental degradation, people across the globe face violent political conflict and war, while they struggle for justice and equity. Critical medical anthropologists have shown how even the most intimate aspects of illness and health are to be understood in the light of such larger political-economic forces, which shape human existence and experience. The authors of this cache volume Radical Health attend to the multiple ways in which health is envisioned, theorized, and actually 'done’ despite much adversity. In this context, radicality refers to unconventional forms of designing or doing healthcare and therapeutic processes that share a transformative ethos; but it is not restricted to novelty, and also implies stubborn forms of insistence on and experimentation with healthcare otherwise. The contributions of this collection derive from a conference entitled Radical Health. Doing Medicine, Health Care, and Anthropology of the Good’ that took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in June 2021. Reflecting the conference set-up, the volume assembles a diverse mix of scholars, healthcare practitioners, activists, and artists who are concerned with the relations between health, power, and inequality, but also look at diverse aspirations for collective care, solidarity, friendship, and more just futures. Their contributions include novel formats like conversations, drawing-based ethnography, or auto-ethnographic writing that test the boundaries of classical academic articles and help 'real utopias’ come into being.