Conference Sub-themes
Mobile workforces: shifts in health and illness
In papers around this theme, we encourage you to explore the health consequences
of the globalisation of goods and services. Telemarketers in India, electronic
workers in Indonesia, garment workers in Bangladesh and the women in Bali
sewing sequins on T-shirts and caps, all provide services and produce
goods for a global market. Their living conditions, their access to health
services, wages and conditions of labour all directly compromise their
health. But workers also travel in search of work, compromising their
health and wellbeing but remitting funds in ways that potential increase
the health of their own families: building labourers from Thailand in
the Emirates, domestic workers from Cambodia and Indonesia in Malaysia,
factory workers in Southeast Asia from Nepal.
Back to Top
Production, reproduction and changing patterns of
infection
HIV has long been recognised in terms of its disrespect for borders,
its transmission enhanced through the mobility of goods, practices and
people: Consider the shifting populations who inject drugs, the increased
rates of infection along transnational truck/bus routes, the introduction
of pharmaceuticals and the methods used for their distribution, the flow
of ideas of prevention and control from multilateral and bilateral aid
agencies and their staff. Emerging and re-emerging diseases - SARS, avian
flu, dengue fever - also highlight the fact that viruses do not honour
national borders. Responses to such outbreaks often provide vehicles for
the re-emergence of cultural tensions of difference: the risk of SARS
confused with being Chinese, for instance.
Back to Top
Disaster, violence, flight and forced movement
War and civil disruption are major factors that impact on the health
of people through regimes of terror, the collapse of institutions and
infrastructure, and the spread of infectious disease, as a result of psychological
as well as physical trauma and, for women, through the specifics of gender-based
violence. These events are major public health and human rights problems
throughout the world, including in Asia and the Pacific, resulting in
flows of people in search of refuge and safety. Environmental disasters
also result in the emergency and long term movement of populations. While
floods, earthquakes, structural violence and rioting seem very different
in their immediate experience, they open up a range of common questions
about health, mobility and human rights.
Back to Top
Health care and wellbeing: global technologies and
local policies
Knowledge, technologies and techniques are mobile, and through their
introduction impact on people's health. This was well illustrated in work
some decades ago on Nestlé and infant feeding, and more recently with
regard to tobacco and pharmaceuticals. But it is also true in relation
to experimental science (consider the studies undertaken on Depo-Provera
trials in Thailand, Mexico and Kenya) and procedures. These include conventional
procedures, when patients travel from one country to another because of
the high quality or relative lower costs (e.g. heart surgery and hip replacements
in Malaysia). But they also include travel for procedures where the source
of goods is questionable (tissue and organ transplants in some settings),
where permission for the procedure is simplified, privacy assured and
cost low (cosmetic surgery and gender surgery in Bangkok), or the services
are experimental ("cures" for spinal cord injury in Beijing).
Back to Top
Emergent identities and social movements
On 3 December 2006, World Disability Day, in New Delhi, the National
Association of the Deaf rallied to call for the recognition of Indian
Sign Language as a scheduled language. In Kuala Lumpur, cross-disability
activitists demonstrated at the central bus station to sustain their campaign
for the introduction of barrier-free and accessible buses. Disability
identity is one of a number of emerging identities in Asia and the Pacific.
People living with HIV/AIDS, people identifying in terms of sexual preference
and gender identity, challenge conventional hierarchies that systematically
exclude, depriving people of their health and human rights. Advocacy,
often in face of considerable opposition and personal risk, is proving
a powerful way to bring about change. In this section, mobility is concerned
with ideas, social movements and their interconnections (including how
telecommunications and computer technology support these developments).
Back to Top |
|
|
