The Society for Medical Anthropology will hold a Spring Conference on March 3-5, 2027, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
The SMA invites anthropologists and allied scholars and practitioners in healthcare and health policy to dwell within “the grey zones” of their research and practice. Grey zones are characterized by confusion and ambiguity; sites of thinking in which the sharp edges of concepts dissolve. In a world marked by wars, volatility, precarity, misinformation, data manipulation and emergent pressures and promises from AI, grey zones challenge the stable oppositions and binary thinking that wash out all complexity and indeterminacy in the experiences of disease and suffering, in knowledge production, in institutional practices and in the discourses surrounding technological innovations. What does it take to dwell within the grey zones? What implications do the grey zones have for our picture of thinking and for our practice on the ground? Do the grey zones demand of us a renewed attention to the concrete and the particular as generative of theory? What new collaborations among disciplines emerge in the grey zones?
In this conference, we seek to move thinking in medical anthropology from overused concepts built on stable oppositions — such as public and private, spectacular and chronic violence, crisis and routine, apocalypse and miracle, frozen renderings of either suffering or flourishing, the a priori consolidated “we” and the “they” — to attend to the genuine difficulties and possibilities faced by people as they live and work in concrete conditions marked by vulnerability and uncertainty.