Collaborations: Building Ethical and Effective Interdisciplinary Partnerships

How can collaboration help us move beyond a disposable future in healthcare - and what does it take to build partnerships that are both effective and just?

These are the questions the After the Single Use team tried to unpack and answer in our "Collaborations" workshop on Wednesday 28 May 2025. Focusing on one of our core research questions, this workshop invited us to reflect on the ethical and practical dimensions of working together across disciplines, countries and sectors. In addition, it challenged us to discuss the potential impact of our research and to consider the normative character of our project. Beyond merely researching disposability in healthcare, do we have an obligation to advocate for sustainable alternatives from the outset?

The workshop opened with three powerful provocations. First, Khoudia Sow offered a glimpse into the advantages but also challenges of the After the Single Use project, involving eight partner countries, each contributing from different perspectives in anthropology, history and the arts. She drew on her experience working in Senegal, where she found at Fann Hospital in Dakar thousands of unused COVID-19 test kits on their way to be incinerated. This incident raised urgent questions about waste, logistics and accountability. Researching practices surrounding sterilization and incineration, she emphasized the need to work in interdisciplinary partnerships involving anthropologists, medical doctors, community health leaders, and nurses.

Second, Raychel Gadson shared her experiences of collaborative work through her PhD research with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, a project focused on housing and environmental justice. She emphasized the challenges associated with taking a mutual aid and community-rooted research approach, mainly the time discrepancy between the urgency felt by communities and the slower rhythms of academic work. Co-production seemed good in principle, but did not work in practice for the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. They faced shortages of staff, inconsistent funding as well as lack of administrative support. Meanwhile, research is too often conducted in a very extractive way - that is taking from the community to benefit the researcher only. She reminded us that ethical collaborations based on a mutual aid approach must begin with curiosity, humility and long-term commitment. It also requires us to let research questions emerge from lived experiences rather than imposing them from above. 

Third, Anastasiia Martynenko brought the room together with a very practical and interactive activity to show us how incomplete our knowledge is when collaboration is lacking. In the interactive session, we were each asked to look for a piece of A4 paper with a big letter written on it under our chair, and then to find letters to pair it with. The word collaboration eventually emerged out of some of the letters. She spoke about the partial understanding one gets by favoring internal collaborations (ex. within a discipline). Collaboration, as she emphasized, can be messy and difficult. Yet it ultimately rests on making mistakes, learning from them, and building trust. 

Following these three provocations, we held in-group conversations about the promises and challenges of working together, and how we could support - and study - social collectives and movements that are resisting or have in the past resisted disposability in medicine and are advocating or have advocated for a more sustainable future. 

We discussed the influence of power dynamics within our project, and the need to recognize the internal hierarchies in terms of experience, status or funding that persist even when we aspire to build flatter structures. Moreover, we discussed the challenges associated with building collaborations in the long run, in particular the risk of losing momentum over time and the ways to sustain our efforts throughout the length of the project. 

In addition, we discussed potential external collaborations that we’re thinking of developing and/or to study throughout the project. These include collaborations with hospitals, mainly healthcare workers, patients, managers, sustainability advisors; waste workers and managers; policymakers and governmental health agencies; international organizations (e.g. WHO); NGOs; environmental justice activist groups and unions; media; artists; as well as researchers from other fields of expertise (ex. environmental health, medical engineering). Some of the outputs we envision, beyond academic publications include blog posts, films/documentaries, street-art, art exhibitions and educational resources for students. Such collaborations aim not only to inform our research, but also to work collectively towards raising political awareness on issues associated with single-use medical devices and building solutions. We might even step out of our comfort zone and build such collaborations and thus create material effects.

Throughout the workshop, one theme kept resurfacing: as researchers, we are not here simply to describe and provide a deeper understanding of issues surrounding disposable medical devices — we are also advocating for change. That means building non-extractive collaborations and valuing everyone’s contributions, as well as changing the current state of affairs in the world. This workshop challenged us to think not only about what research we do, but also whom we do it with and how we can do it more justly. As we aim to transform the ways disposability is embedded in healthcare, it is crucial to do it in a way that pays attention and transforms internal dynamics into just and healthy collaborative practices. This project will also challenge us to do something that historians and anthropologists are not used to - going beyond critique and building collaborations to effect change. 

Images courtesy of © STEWARTATTWOODPHOTOGRAPHY