*** Call for Participants***

 

Bodies across Borders:

The global circulation of body parts, medical tourists and medical professionals

Fondation Brocher, Switzerland, 15 - 17 December 2010

 

We are currently inviting registrations for a forthcoming workshop, Bodies Across Borders: The global circulation of body parts, medical tourists and medical professionals.

 

Workshop Rationale

 

The fields of medicine and healthcare are being transformed by new communications and biomedical technologies, which have facilitated marked increases in the global circulation of body parts, patients and medical professionals across national borders. These movements often echo other movements of capital and resources, travelling from rural to urban areas, from poor to rich, and from the global South to the global North. This workshop will bring together researchers working on different kinds of bodily circulations within the global healthcare and medical environments to explore common themes, concerns and issues, including:

• The underlying structural and economic inequalities between nations and peoples which drive much of the trade in bodily commodities and movements of medical tourists and medical professionals.
  
• The impacts of these movements on the health care industry of the countries that supply medical professionals, healthcare services and body-parts (usually in the global South) and the countries that receive medical professionals, services and body parts (usually in the global North).
  
• The challenge of reconciling the practices, standards and expectations of medical professionals and patients from different countries and healthcare traditions and the question of how and to what extent these circulations of healthcare workers, medical tourists and bodily commodities should be internationally monitored and regulated.

The two day workshop is organised by members of the Health, Place at Society Research Theme based at the Department of Geography, Queen Mary University of London and will be hosted by the Fondation Brocher (www.brocher.ch) at their centre near Geneva.

 

Please contact Beth Greenhough (b.j.greenhough@qmul.ac.uk) for a registration form. Places at the workshop are limited so we would encourage you to register as early as possible. We would particularly like to encourage participants from the global South, early career researchers, PhD students and NGOs, the WHO and the WMA. A registration fee of €100 usually applies, however a limited number of scholarships are available to contribute towards the cost of registration. Please contact Beth Greenhough at b.j.greenhough@qmul.ac.uk for further details.

Beth Greenhough, Isabel Dyck, Tim Brown and Bronwyn Parry