A panel of interdisciplinary scholars discuss the medical and sociopolitical aspects of the current crisis of COVID-19 in Iran. Specifically, the conversation situates COVID-19 in the sociohistorical, political, medical, and cultural contexts in which the discipline of public health has emerged and has been interpreted and understood. Panelists also examine how public imagination and policy are shaped in relation to infectious diseases and what that can teach us about our experience of COVID-19 in present time Iran.
Orkideh Behrouzan is a physician and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, UK. Prior to joining the department in 2017, she taught at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM) at King’s College London and was a 2015-2016 Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research focuses on historical circumstances that have led to the development of psychiatric discourses in Iran, which she writes about in her book, Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran.
Hormoz Ebrahimnejad is Lecturer in History at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton, UK. He has specialized in the history of Qâjâr and his first book was published on power and succession in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Iran. Since 1996, he has focused on the history of medicine in Iran on which he has widely published, including The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries (2009) that he has edited.
Maziyar Ghiabi is a social scientist, historian, and ethnographer currently holding a postdoctoral fellowship at SOAS, University of London, UK. Prior to this position, he was a lecturer at the University of Oxford and Titular Fellow at Wadham College, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paris School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), and a member of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire des Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS), France. Besides working on drug policy, Maziyar has published on urban ethnography and history from below.
