Project B05 – Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition

Processes of Globalization have considerably challenged and to some extent altered the national organization of healthcare systems. In the European context, this becomes visible in at least two ways. First, European welfare states try to overcome possible medical shortages in border regions by engaging in trans-regional cooperation, for example in the field of emergency care. Secondly, patients increasingly use possibilities to receive treatment in another member state, often in order to utilize economic disparities or to gain access to specialized therapy that is unavailable or illegal in the domestic healthcare system. In the course of these border-transcending practices efforts are undertaken to coordinate national regulations on an international level.

Against this background, the project „Border-Transcending Assemblages of Medical Practices” has investigated transnational regulatory strategies and practices in Europe that contest and rearrange nationally anchored health policies and medical infrastructures. It thereby has focussed on bi- and multi-lateral cooperation arrangements in healthcare provision, as well as the coordination of organ donation and transplantation, which is connected to an array of social, ethical and legal questions. The aim was to reconstruct the assemblages of cross-border practices, networks, projects and technologies in order to understand how new spatial formats in this field emerge and relate to persistent national structures. Based on this analysis the project has intended to elaborate on how these new assemblages and their spatial references are able to modify the institutional conditions in Europe.

Results/Publications

Miggelbrink, Jidith / Meyer, Frank (under review): Geopolitics, paralysis and health policy. On the implications of the Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia & Herzegovina’s transplantation system. In: Geopolitics.

Meyer, Frank (accepted): Scaled regulatory regimes under the global condition. An example from organ transplantation. In: Rao, Ursula / Marung, Steffi (Eds.) (2021): Practises and processes of space-making under the global condition. Berlin.

Schwarzenberg, Tom (2019): Negotiating invisible lines: cross-border emergency care in the rural north of Scandinavia. - In: Norsk geografisk tidsskrift (Norwegian Journal of Geography) / 73 (2019) 3, Seite 139-155

Meyer, Frank / Miggelbrink, Judith / Schwarzenberg, Tom (2019): Formatting Practices and Ordering Relations: The Role of Multi-Scalar Regulation and Discourses in the Field of International Organ Transplantation. Working Paper 17 of the SFB 1199. Leipzig.

Meyer, Frank (2019): Mapping organ exchange: Transnational cooperation in transplantation and organ donation in Europe. In: Europa Regional, 2019(2), 23–34.

Miggelbrink, Judith (2019): Staatliche Grenzen. Berlin (Dialektik des Globalen. Kernbegriffe; 4).

Miggelbrink, Judith (2019): Mapping the Toolbox: Assemblage Thinking as a Heuristic. In: Marung, Steffi / Middell, Matthias (Hrsg.): Spatial Formats under the Global Condition. Berlin (Dialectics of the Global; 1).

Meyer, Frank / Miggelbrink, Judith / Beurskens, Kristine (Eds.) (2018): Ins Feld und zurück – Praktische Probleme qualitativer Forschung in der Sozialgeographie. Berlin.

Miggelbrink, Judith / Meyer, Frank / Pilz, Madlen (2016): Cross-border assemblages of medical practices. Working Paper 2 of the SFB 1199. Leipzig.