Piyush Pushkar and John Mulligan discuss their work in mobilising against cuts and privatisation within the NHS

We are delighted to welcome Piyush Pushkar to Blackwell's to talk about his book The Battles To Save The NHS with NHS psychologist, Unison member and anti-cuts activist John Mulligan.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm

General admission is £5 or included in the price of a Book & Ticket.

About the book:

NHS activism sits at the heart of some of the most urgent political struggles in Britain today.

Drawing on rich ethnographic insight, this book depicts the NHS as both a public service and a powerful moral reference point. It follows campaigners in Greater Manchester who mobilize against cuts and privatization, raising fundamental questions about what the NHS is and what it means to save it.

Activists draw on shared memories of a more supportive, solidarity-based welfare state to shape their moral opposition to reform. As their visions of the NHS clash with political and managerial agendas, they forge and reforge collective memories, political identities and social solidarities in the fight to defend public care.

About the author:

Piyush Pushkar is an NHS psychiatrist and also a social anthropologist at the University of Manchester. He is interested in how the ethical imagination of activists solidified around the NHS as a “moral example”. What did they think they were saving? What did the NHS mean to them? What happened when their interpretation butted up against managers and politicians who claimed that they were saving the NHS? He traces the battles over what the NHS is, how people remember its history, what it means, and what it symbolises. His argument is based not just on the stories activists, clinicians, bureaucrats and politicians told him about what the NHS does, but also on their moral imagination: of the NHS, of the state, of society and of socialism.

Description supplied by the event organiser.