[URBANTH-L] CFP SMA Conference 2009: Intersections of Governance and Health in Socialist Societies

[Katherine A. Mason]

CFP for SMA 2009: */Medical Anthropology at the Intersections: 
Celebrating 50 Years of Interdisciplinarity/*, */Yale/**/ 
/**/University/*, */September 24-27, 2009/*

Please circulate widely and apologies for cross-postings! 

Note: The panel is currently written to encompass socialist societies 
but welcomes submissions discussing other countries outside the 
socialist model where governance has had a large impact on health.  In 
this event the panel abstract will be modified accordingly to represent 
the aims of all the papers.

*_Intersections of Governance and Health in Socialist Societies_*
 
    Over the past decade, governance or more specifically 'good 
governance' has been advocated as a 'best practice' for solving complex 
global health problems. The institutionalizing processes necessary for 
establishing 'good governance' are promoted as a method for facilitating 
the transparency and accountability needed to establish effective 
national systems of disease prevention and treatment.  But what does 
'good governance' mean and what institutions are necessary for 
establishing such policies? This panel will disaggregate governance from 
its global framing by discussing the effects of governance on health 
care delivery within countries that have experienced socialism.  We 
consider the importance of negotiations among power, authority, and 
resources that typically steer relations between state and society to 
determine how governance is performed in different contexts and how 
'good governance' is defined within those same contexts. These 
processes, both formal and informal, will subsequently contribute to a 
discussion of how local modes of governance affect and are affected by 
the distribution of health and disease within states that have 
experienced socialism. Specifically we ask how current structures of 
governance are affecting local access to health prevention and treatment 
measures. We also seek to understand how the interaction between local 
definitions of 'good governance' and global discourse affects health 
related programs within a country.
 
*ABSTRACT DEADLINE:  **Monday, March 23, 2009***
* *
*Please send expressions of interest, questions, and abstracts to the 
panel organizers: */
Elanah Uretsky, //George// //Washington// //University//, Department of 
Global Health (euretsky at gwu.edu <mailto:euretsky at gwu.edu>)/
///Katherine Mason, Harvard University, Department of Anthropology 
(kamason at fas.harvard.edu <mailto:kamason at fas.harvard.edu>)/ *__**__*