Protests are a permanent feature of cities worldwide and often produce harm and disability due to violent repression. Yet, unlike natural disasters or conflict zones, instances of politically motivated social unrest have no recognisable form as a setting for medical knowledge and practice. Similarly, spontaneous responses to harm, such as the development of on-site healthcare brigades, are not recognised as formal healthcare. While emergent fields like Public Disorder Medicine have developed protocols for medical action, they frame protest as undifferentiated health risk, neglecting their motives and specific contexts, and obscuring the role of the police in causing harm.

To understand the kind of care that operates outside formal healthcare in contexts of protests and state violence, Chile’s “Estallido Social” [Social Outburst/Explosion] will be used as a case study. In October 2019, large-scale protests were met with unprecedented violence, resulting in 3,765 wounded persons, including 2,122 with gunshot wounds, 411 with ocular trauma, and 34 with permanent loss of vision. Thirty-six people died. In response, numerous volunteer organisations emerged to support and medically assist the wounded protesters amid unaccountable police violence. These groups, comprising medicine, nursing, and psychology students and professionals, and protest participants with varying degrees of medical knowledge, aimed to provide on-site care, mitigate the harm caused by non-lethal strategies, and contribute to sustaining the protests.

Drawing on qualitative analysis of interviews with health brigade participants and individuals involved in the provision of care, this paper explores how forms of emotional and medical support -linking people, spaces, values and forms of knowledge- emerged and responded to police brutality in the context of protracted urban revolts. Results focus on: The emergence of informal, collective care actions; care within the atmosphere of protest; the gradual formalization and identification of medical brigades and ethical complexity on the streets.

The discussion calls for social researchers to view protest as a space to rethink the roles and functions of medicine in the absence of -and against – the State. Tracing sociological and anthropological studies of similar actions worldwide, the concept of "protest medicine" is proposed as a distinct form of medical care emerging within and shaped by the motives and atmosphere of protest.

About the speaker

Dr Cristian Montenegro is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Previously, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter and an Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Cristian’s work critically examines how values shift in mental health policy at local and international scales, examining how different groups - including service users, policymakers, caregivers and service providers - approach and reinterpret core normative categories such as “human rights”, “community”, “participation” and “democracy”.

Cristian has researched the experiences of caregivers of persons with psychosocial disabilities and their interaction with care providers, the activist practices of mental health service-user and survivors in South America, the political and administrative dimensions of community participation in healthcare policy, the political ideologies of public mental health and the social and cultural aspects of early intervention in psychosis. For this, he has used ethnography, oral history, in-depth interviews and documentary analysis. More recently he studied the emergence of informal healthcare responses to police violence in contexts of protest and social upheaval.

The online link to join the seminar will be shared on email an hour before the event.