The future of hospitals, from the South. Epistemologies & Experimentations Workshop

The second phase of the AI and the future of hospital care in Africa workshop is taking place in Paris, France (16th to 19th) with the title “The future of hospitals, from the South. Epistemologies & Experimentations" at MSH—Paris Nord. 

Convened by Divine Fuh (HUMA UCT) and Fanny Chabrol (IRD/CEPED) “The future Hospital” is a collaborative project between Ceped and HUMA Institute for the Humanities in Africa that has received funding from the PHC-PROTEA (scientific partnership between France and South Africa) and from the Global Research Institute of Paris at Université Paris Cité. The project is also supported by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

This June 2025 workshop considers the future as a pressing question to be addressed with radical epistemic and methodological shifts that require collective, borderless and interdisciplinary research and public engagement.  How do we approach possible formations for the hospitals of the future from the Global South and from a social science and humanities perspective that centres the human being and human dignity? 

The workshop titled AI and the future of hospital care in Africa continues with the project of critically interrogating the technological shifts that AI brings to care, particularly hospital care, by mapping and scrutinizing the ethical quandaries or dilemmas that the euphoria for AI activates in a continent deemed to be at the frontiers of transformative AI. 

Explore the program and participants 

The first phase of the workshop and collaboration was held in Cape Town in November 2024 bringing together research fellows at HUMA and Ceped; and engaged the following questions: What is the future of hospital care in a time of paradigm shift in the healthcare sector provoked by Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What will be or become of the hospital as an idea, a project and a technological infrastructure; and why or how should we care about its future in a time of Big data and algorithms? Highly technoscientific promises weigh heavily in future projections, with digitalisation and AI solutions appearing as the new salvation. This salvation is particularly championed by international consulting firms whose speculations dominate the narrative of a future shaped by AI-driven hospital medicine, with the African continent as its new benevolent target. But how is the global AI project shifting the idea, form and operation of the hospital in Africa? How is AI translated or made tangible in the health medical sphere – if at all, and where?

The project intends to critically interrogate the technological shifts that AI can bring to care, particularly hospital care, by mapping and scrutinising the ethical quandaries or dilemmas that the euphoria for AI activates in a continent deemed to be at the frontiers of transformative AI. How do AI development projects translate and interpret care and ethics into new technologies? Firstly, it asks: what is AI in a hospital and healthcare context and where is it to be found? How is it understood? And made sense of? What are the gaps? How is AI technology and innovation discussed? We will map the imaginaries and the concrete technologies/ technoscapes of AI in hospitals, labs, health science, and care interactions, as well as in the movement of drones, production of drugs and vaccines, activation of machines, diagnosis and datasets, amongst others. Secondly, we seek to understand what and how these new developments are shifting patient care, diagnosis, follow-up, patient flow, health work and data management? How is the conversation about care changing? Where is human intelligence challenged or completed by artificial intelligence? What methods and theories are we using to investigate and challenge these ethical quandaries?

The hospital is approached as a place from which to think through the implications of futuristic technologies – in this case AI – in the African context and globally, their impact on modes of being, and their articulations with low-tech interventions into social problems. It foregrounds epistemic questions and seeks methodological options for future collaborative and publicly engaged exchange. Africa is centred as a place from which to think critically about the contemporary world and what being human means. 

Objectives

• Constitute a core group of young scholars and strengthen a network (after the Future Hospital Ethnography post-ASAA workshop in Cape Town in April 2022 and the Hospital Imaginaries ECAS Panel in May 2023; and Workshop in Cape Town in November 2024)
• Build an Exchange program between South Africa/Africa and France/Europe and Beyond (Brazil, Cuba), which aims to push the boundaries of what constitutes hospitals all over the world, with regards to imperatives of human dignity and social justice and thinking from the South.
• Support the production of innovative content and engagement with the public at large: share intersectional insights, community-public oriented, ex: illustrated texts, long formats, podcasts.
• Publication: The final outcome will be a Journal special issue or an Edited volume