As the world around us experiences turbulent changes—digital, political, social, and cultural—the role of the doctor and of health care is shifting too. We urgently need to find and support a new approach to medicine and care which works for and is shaped by those most in need.
We study the ongoing disruption and transformation of medicine with four case studies: Abortion care, LGBTQ+ health activism, Artificial Intelligence and Physician Associate. We ask in each of these cases how medicine without doctors might be imagined, and what such vision would enable or undermine. Across these areas, we study how medical authority is reshaped, how our understanding of care changes, and whose voices come to matter. Our collaborative work in the project is anchored within the thematic concepts of care and voice, and by methodological commitment to play.
Our case studies engage high-stakes topics, which have received strong political and often polemical attention. We aim to move beyond siloed perspectives and create a field of shared intellectual engagement which involves diverse disciplines and communities of practice through playful, design-based methods.
Our case studies are marked by competing claims, views, and voices about the meaning and consequences of health and disease. We ask whose voices come to matter on questions of care, and how they might relate to established hierarchies of medical expertise. How do different voices yield to different kinds of care and medical knowledge and how do they contest our understanding of accountability.
Our case studies bring the question of care into stark focus. We ask what good (medical) care might be and explore how the boundaries of care are set and negotiated. What happens to, and what are the possibilities of care – practically, sociologically, legally, and technologically – when medical expertise is challenged and diminished?
Our methodology centres on creating and experimenting with playful ways of bringing people together across disciplines and sparking new ways of thinking; not playing games, but doing playful research. In our case studies, this enables us to engage with diverse stakeholders and communities; to question both the role and value of doctors in the future; and to ask questions about the sociology of care (how care is organised, valued, and experienced in everyday life) and the philosophy of voice (which asks whose perspectives are heard in healthcare, and whose are left out.)"
Our four case-studies explore a future of medicine that will dramatically change how medical care is conceived, who can access different types of care, and raise significant questions on regulatory capture and accountability for medical expertise and decision making.
exploring abortion care and spaces of resistance from the perspective of ethics and justice.
explores the power of political calls for intersectional community-driven queer care.
tracks technological displacement of expertise and care.
analyses shifting boundaries of professional expertise.