The Department of Global Health & Social Medicine hosts speakers throughout the academic year for seminars to share their research and engage in conversations on topics within the field. 

Below is the seminar schedule and speakers for the 2024-25 academic year. Titles of talks will be confirmed closer to the date of the event.

If you are interested to attend any of the seminars, contact Dr Gabrielle Samuel at gabrielle.samuel@kcl.ac.uk.

• 13 November: Dr Nickolas Surawy Stepney, GHSM Research Associate on 'Morphine: a pharmaceutical?'
  
  Abstract
  Drugs are multiple objects. Classifications such as licit or illicit, therapeutic or poison are configured differently across geographical, temporal, and professional boundaries. Morphine is an opioid drug labelled ‘gold standard’ in pain relief by the WHO, yet in many parts of India the clinical spaces in which it can be prescribed are severely limited, and its consumption is resisted by both patients and doctors alike. Drawing primarily on ethnographic work undertaken around a cancer hospital in north India, I argue that morphine is nevertheless characterised as much by its presence in both symbolic and alternate material forms, as by its absence in the north Indian context. This assertion counters the assumption that morphine carries primarily a pharmaceutical signification and that its absence is somehow irrational or ‘unmodern’. What happens to an object is highly dependent on its classification, and in the case of morphine I argue that its unifying attribution is that of a narcotic. It is grouped not with tramadol, buprenorphine, or other medicines, but instead with those that demand not distribution but restriction. I thus also emphasise the potential for coherence, and the historical, bureaucratic, political, and economic processes through which a single anchoring signification can be maintained amid such multiplicity.
  
  
• 11 December: Dr Nele Jensen, Lecturer in Global Health & Social Medicine;
• 29 January: Professor Lidia Panico, Sciences Po; 
• 19 February: Dr Kriti Kapila, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Law;
• 5 March: Dr Cristian Montenegro, Senior Lecturer;
• 14 May: Professor Sharifah Sekalala, University of Warwick;
• 4 June: Dr David Reubi, Reader in Sociology and Global Health.