The “Democracy as Health” workshop precedes a call for contributions for an edited volume. The theme of the workshop, as well as the call for papers, gravitates around the politicization of public and private healthcare, with health itself increasingly becoming an electoral object. The goal of the workshop is to advance beyond classic Foucaldian biopolitics and to explore different conceptualisations around the relationships between health and democracy.
The workshop was held over the course of two days, where fourteen ethnographic papers were presented and discussed in five panels, accompanied by five keynote presentations. The keynotes were given by Professors Aditya Bharadwaj, Jessica Mulligan (Providence College, USA), Ruth Prince (University of Oslo, Norway), Sandra Bärnreuther (University of Lucerne) and Janina Kehr (Vienna University, Austria). Among the presented papers, Robert Dean Smith presented work that is part of his PhD project “Health as a Form of Politics in North India”.
Overall, the papers presented were very diverse, using different notions of space and time, drawing on various theories in (medical) anthropology and sociology, from developmental to modernist perspectives. Topics explored included biopolitics, universal healthcare, politics of clinical and extra-clinical spaces, rural-urban differences, health as either hope or a form of resistance and refusal. In their diversity, the papers all examine the pursuit and promise of health and how it varies depending on practicing politics, policies, developments of post-colonial histories, through the various ways in which people enter spaces of welfare and healthcare.
The papers presented and discussed will be transformed into outputs that will either figure in an edited volume or a special issue of a scientific journal. Other discussions included future perspectives on potential fieldwork, and how to redefine the epistemological and conceptual space of biopolitics, health and democracy. The plan is to submit the full drafts of the papers for internal review during the autumn of 2026, with a planned submission for early 2027 and publication in early 2028.
The workshop received financial support from the SNF, through the Doc.CH grant “Health as a Form of Politics in North India” (number 222589).