Grassroot responses to healthcare crises at EASA conference
Short Abstract: The pandemic has challenged healthcare systems across the world, straining many by exposing their weak sides in a globally unprecedented manner. This panel brings together researchers that provide an insight into bottom-up responses to various healthcare crises, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Long Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has brought attention to the global injustice in the access to treatments and medication, raising questions of how the free-market economy shapes the futures of those living in countries with less robust or stable healthcare. Recently, the most vivid inequality is the one of the access to coronavirus vaccination, but there are many others, on both global, regional, and local levels across the world. Healthcare systems are complex entities, entangled in power relations of socio-cultural realities they are part of. Their malfunctioning is resisted in a variety of ways that address different issues, whether systemic or executive.
This panel invites papers that inquire into ways of grassroots initiatives, bottom-up strategies, and individual practices that aim to contradict malfunctionings of given healthcare systems. We wish to bring together researchers that study various responses to healthcare crises either by policymakers, NGOs, medical practitioners, or patients. In particular, we invite papers that investigate local manifestations of global inequalities or global health problems, such as a problem of access to pharmaceuticals, global mental healthcare crisis, or female foeticide crisis.