This roundtable will explore the challenges and possibilities that arise in the project of decolonizing medicine. Globally and locally, the violence and limitations of colonial epistemologies and relationships within healing practices are increasingly under scrutiny. As such, widespread efforts to rethink these approaches are underway. However, these efforts, which often take the form of encounters between traditional and bio- medicines, are complex, and raise difficult questions regarding how best to restore justice and produce knowledge in the midst of conflicting ontological, epistemological, and moral territories.
In Canada, the term ‘reconciliation’ is ever-present, and yet, the project of reconciliation is increasingly criticized for its emptiness and performativity. In medicine, many small victories have taken place, as fire codes are overruled to allow smudging in hospitals, as traditional medicines are integrated into pharmacies, and as Indigenous advocates are appointed in care settings. However, the lived realities of many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people still involve profound health inequalities and daily encounters with racism. Is a much larger shift required, one that reflects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations rather than merely aims for cultural sensitivity in a colonial context?
Epistemological challenges loom large as well, taking on unique, and yet resonant, forms in global and local contexts, where the impacts of colonization are felt differently, in terms of proximity and temporality. Across global health initiatives, integrative medicine programs, and contemporary debates on evidence, increasing efforts are being made to articulate heterogeneous therapeutic traditions. Yet such encounters remain deeply contested, criticized for reproducing epistemic hierarchies, forcing translations of non-biomedical practices into biomedical terms, thereby marginalizing forms of knowledge, care, and healing that exceed dominant evidentiary frameworks. At the same time, therapeutic pluralism is an undeniable reality, as patients and practitioners continually navigate between multiple medical worlds. The question, therefore, is not whether encounters between different therapeutic traditions should occur, but how they might be (re)organized and better understood.
This workshop invites both critical and propositional reflections on the complex project of the decolonization in medicine. Contributions will examine the forms of violence, exclusion, appropriation, or reduction that may accompany projects of integration, comparison, or evidence-making, as well as work that explores alternative modes of care. What might more equitable, attentive, and non-hegemonic relations between different understandings of healing require? How might concepts such as evidence, efficacy, care, expertise, translation, comparison, collaboration, or diplomacy be rethought in contexts of therapeutic plurality? And what kinds of institutions, practices, or forms of inquiry might enable different healing traditions to enter into meaningful relation without erasing their differences?
Drawing on perspectives from the social studies of medicine, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, philosophy, history, and related fields, the workshop aims to foster an interdisciplinary conversation about how encounters between diverse therapeutic worlds are imagined, enacted, contested, and transformed.
Hosted by the Department of Social Studies of Medicine in partnership with the School of Population and Global Health, Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy and the Wellcome Trust funded project Between Deception and Dissent
For questions or accessibility requests, please contact Phoebe Friesen: phoebe.friesen@mcgill.ca
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Alex McComber, Bear clan, Kanien'keha:ka, Community Health Researcher "Perspectives from Indigenous Community"
Samir Shaheen-Hussain, Pediatric Emergency Physician, author of “Fighting for A Hand to Hold: Confronting Medical Colonialism against Indigenous Children in Canada" "Confronting Medical Colonialism: Reparations before Reconciliation"
Leslie Sabiston, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, McGill University "Learning New Tricks: Decolonization as Counter-Magic?"
Laurence Kirmayer, Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University "Decolonizing Cultural Psychiatry"
Lisa Schmidt-Herzog, PhD Researcher, Université de Mons and Academy of Fine Arts, Munich "Decolonizing What? Frantz Fanon and the Epistemological Stakes of Revolutionary Vitalism"
Katrin Solhdju, Research Professor of the F.R.S.- FNRS, University of Mons, Belgium "An Art of Comparison? Reimagining Encounters between Traditional- and Bio-Medicines"
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Phoebe Friesen, Associate Professor, Department of Social Studies of Medicine, Department of Equity, Ethics, and Policy, McGill University