Authors

Discussion

The variety of the existing informal practices and ways of conceptualising them allows us to see the informal as multiple: as corruption and underdevelopment, as ways to “get by”, as a tool of resistance to the state, or as innovation that in the end gets formalised. Russian healthcare is characterised by high complexity of infrastructure and hierarchies, bureaucratisation and lack of autonomy which creates a fertile environment for informal practices to flourish. My research attempts to understand how the informal practices fill in the cracks in the Russian healthcare system and become its “grease” by giving this system flexibility and humanity which it otherwise cannot afford. 

In my research I am focusing on practices in which patients and patient organisations engage in order to construct access to medicines for which they are entitled by law but which are hard to get in practice. My presentation will be built around results of an ethnographic research of patient organisations that aim to help people with rare and oncological diagnosis in Russia. Besides literature on informality, I will be drawing from Science and Technology Studies (STS) as this angle places intertwining of material and social in the spotlight and allows for analysis on the level where informal practices become visible.