Groundwork for a transnational sociology of medicine

Tine Hanrieder, Research Fellow of the WZB’s Global Governance research unit, has been awarded with a Freigeist (Free Spirit) Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation for her innovative research on Global Health. Her research project “Medical Internationalisms and the Making of Global Public Health (Dr.GLOBAL)” explores the transnational contest for expert authority in the field of global health through a study of French, US, and Cuban health missions in Haiti – a country which has become a paradigmatic laboratory of foreign health intervention.

Dr.GLOBAL’s objective is to understand how (curative) ‘biomedicine’ or (preventative) ‘social medicine’ become dominant in this contest and why. Going beyond Anglo-centric diffusion stories, the project starts from the claim that the export of knowledge from medically developed to developing countries is not a one-way street but a cross-trade of expertise. Health internationalists forge new alliances across borders, learn new ways of promoting health, and their professional prestige gained abroad becomes a power resource at home as well.

For example, Harvard-based health internationalists adopt ideas from Cuban family doctors to run community projects in Haiti, but they also reimport these ‘social medicine’ approaches to Boston and thus challenge the dominance of biomedicine in the US. Dr.GLOBAL employs interviews and descriptive statistics to understand how expert power travels across contexts. Combining insights from sociological field analysis, global history, postcolonial studies, and medical history and anthropology, the project aims to lay the groundwork for a transnational sociology of medicine.

The fellowship which is funded with 610,000 Euro allows Tine Hanrieder to build her own research team at the WZB. The Volkswagen Foundation honours young researchers with a ‘Freigeist’-Fellowship who open up new horizons with their research and combine critical analysis with imagination and innovative solutions. By thinking ahead the ‘Free Spirit’ fellow will act as a catalyst in overcoming existing disciplinary, institutional and even national boundaries.