Event location
Seminar will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 14:00-15:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online
Abstract
In 2019, a report by the organization Healthcare Without Harm revealed that the healthcare sector is responsible for 4-5% of global carbon emissions. Remarkably, if the sector were a country, it would rank as the fifth largest emitter in the world. How is it that a system devoted to saving lives and alleviating suffering is also contributing to harm—both to people and the planet? In just 50 years’ time, we have come to naturalise the use of single use plastic in healthcare, and almost forgotten that there is any alternative.
In this conversation, Alice Street and Anne Kveim Lie will present their new Wellcome Trust-funded project, After the Single Use, which is a large international research project, combining critical approaches from anthropology and history to understand how we got here and what we can do about it. The project involves researchers in Switzerland, USA, Senegal, India, Norway, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, and Scotland, and partners with the organisation Health Care Without Harm and the BIOART arena. If time allows, they will also discuss the complexities of large international research projects.
Here is more about the project (earth.ed.ac.uk)
Bio
Alice Street is Professor of Anthropology and Health at the University of Edinburgh. Her research includes studies of health systems, global health interventions and medical innovation. She has carried out ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea and India and is the author of ‘Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital’, published by Duke University Press. She was the Principal Investigator for ‘Investigating the Design and Use of Diagnostic Devices in Global Health’ (DiaDev), funded by the European Research Council, which focused on diagnostic innovation in global health contexts of primary health care, elimination, and public health emergencies. She is now the PI of the Wellcome Trust-funded project After the Single Use. Dr. Street is a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute Medical Committee, the Wellcome Trust Joint Health Systems Research Committee and a co-Editor of Medicine, Anthropology, Theory.