International Conference on Global Values for Global Health

University of California, May 5th and 6th 2008.

This conference brings together a distinguished panel of interdisciplinary and international scholars and medical practitioners to explore the divergent and often unarticulated values that lay behind global health initiatives and policies and medical humanitarian interventions in developing countries especially during public health emergencies (like the global AIDS epidemic) or following political or natural disasters. It is concerned with the globalization and politicization of values in health priority-setting, policy, governance, practice, and research. The invited speakers will reflect on their extensive experience as physicians, anthropologists and medical ethnographers, bioethicists and policy makers working in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the United States. We may live in a globalized world, but the discourse on global values is under-theorized. Meanwhile, a great many global medical and humanitarian interventions are often guided, consciously or not, by market values such as individual choice, responsibility, and accountability that come into conflict in local settings where community-based values (such as “ubuntu” in South Africa) may predominate. Several participants have been deeply involved in responding to the global AIDS epidemic in Africa and Latin America where the clash between local, state, and global values and priorities are most acute. Speakers have been asked to think critically and reflexively about global and local moral worlds, about the value of values, about how divergent cultural and moral contexts are taken into account or are disregarded by global medical, humanitarian, and philanthropic organizations. In the clash of conflicting values how should priorities and agendas be set for global health policies, for guiding interventions, and for designing research projects?

Day 1 MONDAY MAY 5

Welcoming Reception 5:30-6:30 pm
George and Mary Foster ANTHROPOLOGY LIBRARY, 230 Kroeber Hall

6:30–8:30pm Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall

Keynote - "AIDS PROGRAMS AND FUNDING: WHO SETS THE AGENDAS"?
Michelle Mc Murry, MD, PhD, Director of the Health, Biomedical Science and Society Initiative at the Aspen Institute

Discussants:

Didier Fassin, MD,PhD, EHESS, Paris, former vice president of Médecins sans frontières
Author of When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa

João Biehl, PhD, Anthropology, Princeton University.
Author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival.

Vinh Kim Nguyen, M.D., M.Sc. Ph.D., University of Montreal.
As an HIV physician and medical anthropologist, Nguyen's fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire has explored the cultural and political dimensions of global responses to the AIDS epidemic

Day 2 Tuesday, May 6

Each speaker will discuss a key value or values that may have some global currency, but which suffers distortion in translation to local settings, or vice-versa, a local value facing equally difficult problems in translatability to global discourses on values.

PLENARY I Empathy, Solidarity and Moral Imagination
9am-12pm Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

9:00-9:30 Introductions – Welcome

9:30-10:00
Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
"Modality: Possible Worlds and Actual Worlds"

10:00-10:30
Naomar De Almeida Filho, Chancellor, UFBA, Federal University of Bahia UFBA, Brazil
"Post-Humanism and Global Health: a view from Brazil"

10:30–11:00
Anne M. Lovell, Research Scientist, Centre de Recherche Psychotropes, Santé Mentale, Société, Paris "21st Century “Charity- Reflections on post-Katrina"

11:00-11:30
Brackette Williams, Senior Justice Advocate, Open Society Institute
"Life – A View of Value for Worthy and Unworthy Life"

11:30–12:00
Discussants: Loic Wacquant ( Prof of Sociology, Berkeley), Stefania Pondolfo, Associate Professor of Anthropology) Noon – 12:30 General Discussion LUNCH 1:00- 2:00pm IIS Conference Room, 223 Moses Hall

PENARY II Less Death For the Many: Triage, Solidarity and Humanitarianism
2pm–5:30pm IIS Conference Room, 223 Moses Hall

2:00–2:30
João Biehl, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University "The Will to Live"

2:30-3:00
Vinh Kim Nguyen, Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Montreal University, Montreal “Triage/Solidarity"

3:30-4:00pm
Didier Fassin, École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Université Paris Nord "Humanitarianism"

4:00 -4:30
Discussants: Lawrence Cohen, Nancy Scheper-Hughes

4:30-5:30
Global Health and Global Rights

TOWN HALL DISCUSSION led by Professors Charles Briggs, Cori Hayden, Laura Nader and Aihwa Ong

7pm Dinner for Speakers and Discussants