GRAMNet Steering Group member Nicola Burns is involved in a new project, Doctors Within Borders that examines mobile populations in contemporary health systems. 

Healthcare on the Move: Future Directions
Online Workshop 3 | 23-24 September 2021

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, the call to ‘return to normal’ has been consistently articulated alongside demands to ‘build back fairer’. Ideas surrounding the protection of public and individual health drove public policy in the pandemic, disrupting the movement of people and things within and across borders. As a result, refugees, migrants and other members of mobile populations have increasingly faced an emerging ‘sanitary apartheid’ (Heller 2021), that is a reinforcement of border regimes in the name of preserving public health.

This workshop asks what role can research play in disrupting a ‘return to normal’ where entitlement and access to healthcare for members of these mobile groups remains a key arena where bordering practices and the denial of rights continue to play out. Consolidating key insights from Doctors within Borders Workshops 1 and 2, the aims of the final workshop are to support further collaboration between network participants, and to continue developing a research agenda around health mobilities. We invite participants to consider how calls for mobility justice (Sheller 2018) can be aligned with the critical exploration of health care access for mobile populations in this time of multiple crises.

Discussions within the network thus far have highlighted the paradoxes of healthcare, recognising the dichotomy of care and control by state, and the (in)visibility of mobile populations as they are subject to bordering practices, which make them appear transient in the eyes of healthcare (and welfare) systems. This transience renders particular groups vulnerable to ill health generated by the conditions this (in)visibility engenders as they are denied the full recognition of citizenship. To learn more about our about previous work, you can explore the Working Papers from Workshop 1 here and the Programme of our recent Workshop 2 here. The present call focuses on healthcare and mobility futures, seeking both critical assessments of emerging trends at the intersections of bordering, healthcare and public health, as well as imaginative proposals that transcend the inequalities of (im)mobility and access to healthcare.

First published: 23 September 2021

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