Though healthcare provides fundamental conditions of (im)possibility for life in the places we research, the workings of public (socialized, employment-based, welfare state) healthcare often remain both allusive and elusive in the studies of science, technology, and medicine (STM). While conceiving of healthcare provision, access, and policy as underlying analyses of biomedical knowledge production, patient-doctor relationships, and illness subjectivities, we seldom explore in depth the co-constitutive forces of the knowledges, practices, and technologies involved in producing, operating, maintaining, and transforming public healthcare.

Healthcare structures index particular histories, ethics, and ideologies. They represent a foundational politics of life baked into institutions, pre-structuring care relationships, and organizing social life and membership. They can be a source of stability, solidarity, and social prosperity, much as they generate gaps and uncertainties, strategic ignorances and bureaucracies of exclusion.

We invite fellow STM scholars to help us develop better vocabulary, methods, and theories for understanding and analyzing practices of administering and the administration of public healthcare. Topics may include:

– intersecting marginalizations (e.g. citizenship, housing status, disability, queerness, indigeneity, race, ethnicity, and gender) re/produced through limitations or intentional absences in healthcare access and equity;
– practitioners navigating professional mandates and practical constraints in administering patient care and resources;
– public healthcare governance across municipal, provincial/state, and federal scales;
– overlapping public-private responsibilities;
– public administration of identifying, diagnosing, and/or treating medical conditions;
– budgeting and legislating biomedical knowledges and healthcare resources;
– tacit knowledges, professional training and accreditation;
– discourses and rhetorics of welfare, publics, privatization, responsibility, and more.