Mirko Pasquini
About Mirko Pasquini
Mirko Pasquini, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg and affiliated researcher at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Uppsala University.
Research Areas:
His research interests combine medical anthropology, global and public Health governance with a focus on triage, emergency medicine, medical ethics and decision-making. These are explored through hospital ethnography and primary care in Italy and Sweden. Mirko's research ranges from the social dynamics of attention in triage, to trust, mistrust and violence in care interactions.
Mirko worked across different healthcare systems in Europe. He is currently engaged in international projects on mistrust and violence against healthcare staff, collaborating with regional healthcare authorities in Sweden and Italy to bring research insights into community-centered primary care. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6570-539X
The Negotiation of Urgency:
Mirko defended his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology in May 2021. His work, “The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room”, has been awarded the annual Westinska Prize (2021) for outstanding dissertation by the Royal Society of Humanists at Uppsala University.
A revised version of the book is now published by Rutgers University Press (2025) in the “Medical Anthropology, Health, Inequity and Social Justice” series.
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-negotiation-of-urgency/9781978836266/
The book ethnographically explores the everyday life of an Italian Emergency Room as a place where urgency is at stake; caught up in and contested, by competing understandings concerning existential, social and economic precarity. The ER is described as a place of conflict and creative reinvention, where productive negotiations of more equitable ways to distribute care take place amid ER staff and suffering people struggling for social justice.
The Lancet Cases in Global Social Medicine:
To foster the application of social concepts within global health, public health and clinical medicine, Mirko is part of the core editorial team of “The Lancet Cases in Global Social Medicine”.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)02103-8/fulltext
This case series introduces a translational social medicine toolkit designed to help clinicians and communities address the social and structural forces that drive health inequities. Developed through collaboration among social scientists, medical professionals, and community members, the toolkit connects societal-level evidence with clinical practice and patient experiences. The series features patient and community stories from around the world – especially the global South, East, and Indigenous contexts – to highlight how discrimination, authoritarianism, and inequality shape health. The series releases monthly cases over the year (November 2025 to the end of 2026). Its goal is to guide equitable health-care practice and foster solidarity in confronting global barriers to health and wellbeing.
Mistrust in Practice:
Mirko’s latest research project, “Mistrust in Practice: An Ethnography of Suspicion in General Medical Practice in the Aftermath of COVID-19,” funded by the Swedish Research Council, examines the so-called “crisis of trust” in healthcare by focusing on post-pandemic Italy. He has published widely on this topic across social science and global health outlets, and he is currently planning a book that explores mistrust as both a destructive and a potentially productive force within healthcare systems.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mirko-Pasquini-3?ev=hdr_xprf
Teaching:
Mirko teaches at both graduate and and undergraduate level and he has recently designed the PhD master level course: "Vulnerable Evidence: Trust and Trustworthiness in Medical Knowledge within and Beyond the Pandemic", the course is inspired by his research on mistrust and the creation of medical evidence in emergency medical settings.
Since 2018, Mirko is engaged in health workers’ training in “Structural Competency”, an innovative curriculum in social medicine originated at UC Berkley, in Sweden, Denmark and Italy.
He is also an active member of the Society for Medical Anthropology special interest group on “Teaching to health professionals”, a board member of the Swedish Anthropology Association (SANT) and coordinates the “Hospital Ethnography peer-meetings” within the Medical Anthropology Europe Young Scholars Network (MAYS).