A critical, interdisciplinary workshop hosted by Kent Law School academics in Canterbury enabled a public discussion on the regulation and social ordering of alternative and traditional healing in health practices around the world.<\/p>\n
The two-day workshop, entitled Negotiating the boundaries of \u2018legitimate healthcare\u2019: regulation, normativities and the social ordering of alternative and traditional healing<\/a> marked the end of the second year of a five-year Wellcome Investigator Award (2017 \u2013 2022) on Law, Knowledges and the making of \u2018Modern Healthcare.\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n International scholars, students and members of the public gathered at Canterbury Cathedral Lodge in November for a series of talks and panels on issues related to the practice and governance of alternative and traditional healing.<\/p>\n Organised by the research project\u2019s Principle Investigator Professor Emilie Cloatre<\/a> and Research Fellows Dr Nayeli Urquiza Haas<\/a> and Dr Francesco Salvini Ramas<\/a>, the workshop brought together different points of view, from across a broad range of disciplines, and enabled attendees to interrogate the complex ways in which therapies, that rest on assumptions outside of biomedicine, fit in healthcare practices.<\/p>\n Alongside a discussion of the commonalities and differences of healthcare practices around the world, the workshop addressed questions about: the role of recognition in the regulation of traditional and alternative medicines; the unexpected effects in practice from different regulation models; and the ways in which regulatory models accommodate historical exclusionary practices entangled in social ordering systems like gender, race, nationality, and (post) colonialism.<\/p>\n Dr Salvani Ramas said: \u2018The workshop provided the basis not only to enrich the grounds of the analytical framework of our research, but also to further support an international and interdisciplinary community of scholars involved in a critical understanding of\u00a0how to frame, organise and accommodate alternative and traditional practices in healthcare systems\u00a0and in society today.\u2019<\/p>\n Law, Knowledges and the making of \u2018Modern Healthcare\u2019 explores the regulation of traditional and alternative medicines, in Europe and Africa, historically and in contemporary contexts. It does so through a socio-legal exploration of the regulation of traditional and alternative medicines in two regions where policy conversations have been particularly intense, and current regulatory systems remarkably varied (Europe and Africa). It focuses on six case studies, in three sub-regions that offer an overview both of the diversity of contexts in which those questions arise, and of the diversity in regulatory responses that states have adopted: France and England; Ghana and Senegal and Mauritius and La Reunion.<\/p>\n