A Research Workshop on Medical Migration

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The last decades have witnessed an escalation in the transnational movement of people, capital, technologies, and discourses circulating in the name of health and life. New kinds of global actors, termed medical tourists and medical refugees, are the focus of increased attention, concern, and optimism. These travelers, ranging from the poor to affluent, desperate to dissatisfied, traverse multiple biopolitical borders in search of biomedical therapeutics for themselves or to supply organs for others. While such processes have become a critical component of global mobility and contemporary biopolitics, they are an under-analyzed aspect of migration studies and social scientific research. This workshop explores the conditions of these global quests for biomedical therapeutics or "medical migrations." The organizers have convened twelve scholars, whose research tracks global flows of medical migrants, in the first systematic investigation to ask: what do these transnational movements reveal about the contemporary conditions and consequences of the global biopolitics of beauty, health, and life? The workshop is guided by three specific aims: (1) to develop and refine the analytic category of medical migration; (2) to develop a tool-kit of comprehensive and cutting-edge concepts and methods for anthropological research into the global flows of people, capital, technologies, and discourses, which circulate in the name of health and life; and (3) to disseminate the participant's collective work by publishing an edited volume on the topic of medical migrations intended to reach both a popular and an academic audience.