Contagious Counter-Worlds: On the Idea of an Alternative in German Primary Healthcare.

Abstract

This article discusses experimental attempts and imaginaries of interdisciplinary healthcare in alternative group practices, focusing on health activist movements in contemporary Germany and their predecessors in the 1970s-to-1980s, West German 'Health Movement'. As new forms of working in primary care, these practices stand for reimagining medical practice as a sociopolitical institution, and its possibilities for remaking patient and doctor subjectivities. Both times, this activism is part of broader developments of social-cultural and political change, and pervaded with a stubborn, critical optimism in its potential to foster societal transformations that extend beyond the group practice as a physical place. I explore these experimental projects through Davina Cooper's (2013) concept of "everyday utopia", arguing for closer attention to the affects, desires and attachments healthcare professionals, and in particular doctors project onto them. Drawing on utopian studies and health activism literature, I take up Cooper's distinction between "imagination" and "actualization" to argue how, regardless of its success, experimenting with alternative ways of practising and working together makes current conditions in medicine bearable for those involved.