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Social medicine is an umbrella term for a plurality of initiatives unfolding in diverse ways since the 19th century and at- tempting to solve social problems and make access to medi- cine easier and fair. In other words, social medicine has been considered as a way to achieve social justice through medical and health practices. Social medicine has also been drawing widely on exchanges and collaborations with social sciences, bringing new modes of understanding the ‘social’, as well as new forms of practices and teaching in medicine and health professions. This event interrogates the different forms of social medicine in relation to contemporary stakes such as climate change, technological imperative, global health, or economic rationalization.

In this workshop, we aim to reinvigorate social medicine and social justice informed perspectives in Switzerland within both social sciences and health sciences to foster a critical dialogue and collaborations. This takes place in a context of raising global interest for social medicine as a critical concept for re- thinking global health, teaching, and more generally what the ‘social’ means in medical and health researches and practices.

We would like to address the following questions: Is social medicine meant only as medicine for the poor and the under- served? What are the challenges posed by nation-based constructions of health systems & policies, and how to overcome them in a social justice perspective? How can social justice related to human health be articulated with environmental health and animal health? What are the main challenges posed by technological advances, in short biomedicine, for building policies that advance a social justice goal? How to enhance collaborations at the intersection of social sciences, medical, and health sciences to deal with these novel stakes and capture the complexity of the social processes and lived experiences?