Event Details

Dr Marco Checchi from Northumbria University will present this OWT research seminar. The seminar is hybrid, in person in Charles Carter A15 and online via Teams (Teams Meeting ID: 381 630 692 290 and Passcode: rULYso ).

Marco Checchi1, George Kokkinidis2, Delia Da Mosto3, Sara Vallerani4, Silvia Giaimo3,5, Elisa Adami3, Leonardo Mammana3,5

1 Northumbria University

2 University of Essex

3 Association Centre for International and Intercultural Health APS

4 Université de Genève

5 Centre for Research and Studies in International and Intercultural Health, University of Bologna

Abstract:

Social and economic inequalities have a profound impact on health and wellbeing. As lack of control over decisions and actions that shape our lives and health is recognised as an important determinant of poor health (Baxter et al., 2022), forms of individual and collective participation and the more general reference to communities are celebrated as the contemporary zeitgeist in healthcare (Palmer, 2020; Palmer et al., 2019). Yet, discourses on participation often tend to sideline discussion of politics, power and ideology within organisational structures (Hui et al., 2020) and structural asymmetries in power between healthcare professionals and service users (Pickin et al., 2002). Popay et al. (2020) note how participation has progressively been depoliticized, privileging a focus on the psycho-social characteristics of communities that ultimately ignores the wider social and economic circumstances that determine inequalities. The proposed conference paper looks at alternative forms of organising in healthcare that explicitly present themselves as political (Da Mosto et al., 2023). We look at the international network of social clinics (INOSC), primary healthcare providers from Italy, Greece, Germany and France sharing a political understanding of health and fostering the organisation of an activist politics of care (de La Bellacasa, 2017) through autogestion, solidarity and mutualism. The empirical material for this research comes from our direct involvement with INOSC as active members and researchers since the foundation of the network. Starting from contemporary conceptualisations of resistance (Checchi, 2021; Lilja, 2021) that focus more on its creative and constructive potential, rather than on its oppositional stance, we look at how different INOSC activists make sense of the word ‘resistance’, how they use it in relation to their practices and how their practices become the place to re-make sense of the word and elaborate different conceptualisation of resistance.

• Baxter, S., Barnes, A., Lee, C., Mead, R., & Clowes, M. (2022). Increasing public participation and influence in local decision-making to address social determinants of health: A systematic review examining initiatives and theories. Local Government Studies, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2022.2081551

• Checchi, M. (2021). The primacy of resistance: Power, opposition and becoming. Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Da Mosto, D., Vallerani, S., Kokkinidis, G., Checchi, M., Giaimo, S., Adami, E., & Mammana, L. (2023). Building communities of health: The experience of European social clinics. Community Development Journal. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsad015

• de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). U of Minnesota Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=jil0DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT6&dq=matters+of+care+bellacasa&ots=xsJuxsr0FV&sig=--6D0-hSpuEBbSmj89fWHnWC8rM

• Hui, A., Latif, A., Hinsliff-Smith, K., & Chen, T. F. (2020). Exploring the impacts of organisational structure, policy and practice on the health inequalities of marginalised communities: Illustrative cases from the UK healthcare system. Health Policy, 124(3), 298–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2020.01.003

• Lilja, M. (2021). Constructive resistance: Repetitions, emotions, and time. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

• Palmer, V. J. (2020). The Participatory Zeitgeist in Health Care: It is Time for a Science of Participation. Journal of Participatory Medicine, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.2196/15101

• Palmer, V. J., Weavell, W., Callander, R., Piper, D., Richard, L., Maher, L., Maher, L., Boyd, H., Herrman, H., Furler, J., Gunn, J., Iedema, R., & Robert, G. (2019). The Participatory Zeitgeist: An explanatory theoretical model of change in an era of coproduction and codesign in healthcare improvement. Medical Humanities, 45(3), 247–257. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2017-011398

• Pickin, C., Popay, J., Staley, K., Bruce, N., Jones, C., Jones, C. D., Jones, C. L., & Gowman, N. (2002). Developing a model to enhance the capacity of statutory organisations to engage with lay communities. Journal of Health Services Research & Policy, 7(1), 34–42. https://doi.org/10.1258/1355819021927656

• Popay, J., Whitehead, M., Ponsford, R., Egan, M., & Mead, R. (2020). Power, control, communities and health inequalities I: theories, concepts and analytical frameworks. Health Promotion International, 36(5), 1253–1263. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daaa133