Health and Healthcare as Capital

This seminar seeks contributions that analyse the representations and realities of health and healthcare as capital. Rather than limiting the concept of ‘capital’ to the traditional, economic definition, we aim at understanding health as social and cultural capital, recently defined as ‘the repertoire of cultural skills, verbal and nonverbal competencies, attitudes and behaviors, and interactional styles, cultivated by patients and clinicians alike, that, when deployed, may result in more optimal health care relationships’ (Shim 2010, p.1).

Building on recent turns in medical humanities and medical anthropology, as well as on the inter-disciplinary intersections between these two fields, we will engage in questions relating – but not limited – to:

• Pain and its influence on (ethnic, gender, national, and other) power relations
• Health as symbolic capital
• Performances of healthiness/ wellbeing and/or illness/injury in relation to social and economic capital
• Hospitals as capitals of health
• Healthcare and inequality
• The impact of health policy on the clinical encounter
• Literary and Filmic representations of the bureaucracy of health
• Narratives of psychological care

We are interested in theoretically oriented contributions from various disciplines: literature, anthropology, history, visual art, cinema studies, and others. One panel will focus on representations of health as capital in film and television, with the two other planned panels to be shaped based on the papers accepted.