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Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma Ata to Bio-Tech, a history of norms, knowledge production and care (1978-2020)

The project seeks to generate significant shifts in understanding its scientific and organisational specificity and role in developing clinical norms, debating ‘rights-based’ approach to health access and leading campaigns for access to drugs while deploying bespoke biotechnological tools.

This history will inform humanitarian practice and contribute to ongoing debates on how humanitarian medical providers engage with pharmaceutical and biotech industries to disseminate, repurpose, and research drugs and diagnostic tools. 

The project will develop four work packages building up from patient-centred clinical norms and concerns on care to experimental initiatives in humanitarian setting and state-led norm-setting diplomacy through emergency medical teams (EMTs) initiatives.

The project will place historical records, their use and preservation, at the heart of humanitarian practices and transform the way that researchers and practitioners deploy evidence from the very recent past. The project will draw from archives (existing NGO archives, public records, personal papers collected in the Humanitarian Archive at the University of Manchester John Rylands Research Institute and Library) and will create new archives through oral history and project field work.

The project is titled ‘Developing Humanitarian Medicine: from Alma Ata to Bio-Tech, a history of norms, knowledge production and care (1978-2020)’ and will have a duration of of five years.

A full project website will be launched soon and links to job adverts for associated research and archival posts will be posted here. The project is funded by the Wellcome Trust ().

Project Team/Contact:

• PI:
• Project manager: Dr Stephanie Rinaldi

For more information, visit the .