History & Policy

Roberta Bivins (Warwick): 'Stop reinventing the Wheel: Prompting critical reflection on medical responses to migration' Today, migration is framed as a crisis, and often one of unprecedented scale, complexity and diversity. Yet from a historian's perspective, neither this language nor the phenomena described by it are novel. Globally, the second half of the twentieth century was characterised by mass movements of population. Moreover, medical practices and ideas about 'good' citizenship and 'good' behaviour have been integral to state management of both migrant populations and the ethnic communities that emerged as migrants became citizens and stakeholders. In theory, then, national and international organisations should be able to mobilise fifty years of clinical and public health experience with migrant and ethnic populations. Yet this valuable resource is rarely tapped, or even recognised, by those newly charged with each successive 'crisis'. The outcomes -- positive or negative -- of previous interventi