Panel Proposal | WorldLeish7 | Cartagena, Colombia | August 1 - 6, 2022 What can social sciences contribute to understanding and addressing leishmaniasis?: Examples from the field Panel speakers:  Mady Malheiros Barbeitas [Chair] - Centre de recherche médecine, sciences, santé, santé mentale, société (CERMES 3) /Inserm, France  Lina Pinto-García [Co-chair] - Interdisciplinary Center for Development Studies (CIDER), Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), University of Oxford, UK  Jaime Larry Benchimol [speaker] - Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (COC/Fiocruz), Brazil.  Louis-Patrick Haraoui [speaker] - Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada. Abstract: In the mid-2000s, the World Health Organization (WHO) began developing institutional actions to address the social determinants of health at the global, national, and local levels (Marmot, 2005). This could be read as an attempt to return to the Declaration of Alma-Ata by creating a new strategy to commit countries to reactivate Primary Health Care activities. (Gradmann, 2022). Such determinants consist of the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, as well as the broader set of forces and systems shaping health and disease in daily life. This “new” framework has come to occupy a prominent place in global health, most recently with the creation of a new Department of Social Determinants of Health in the context of the WHO General Programme of Work (2019-2023) (WHO, 2019). “Why treat people’s illnesses without changing what made them sick in the first place?” is one of the WHO statements that have summarized what this approach is all about (WHO, n.d.). Despite these efforts and the urgent need to draw attention to and address the persistent political, economic, cultural, and socio-environmental factors that maintain inequities, vulnerability, susceptibility, and high risk for neglected tropical diseases such as leishmaniasis, the dominant strategies in both biomedical research and public health programs still focus on pharmaceuticals (Allotey et al., 2010; Pokhrel et al., 2011). In dialogue with the social determinants framework (Yates‐Doerr, 2020), social scientists from fields as varied as Critical Medical Anthropology, Social Studies of Science & Technology (STS), Sociology of Health & Illness, History of Medicine, and Health Humanities have insisted, based on a large body of theoretical elaborations and empirical findings, on the need to understand and address first and foremost the root causes of poor health. However, there are still very few genuinely interdisciplinary initiatives in which biomedical scientists and epidemiologists collaborate horizontally with anthropologists, sociologists, and historians to make visible and challenge the root causes of disease and health inequities. In fact, health sciences tend to invoke the participation of social scientists only when it is deemed necessary that a technology or an intervention has better acceptance by a particular community, or when non-biomedical knowledge and treatments are thought to pose a threat to the biomedical management of a particular health problem. However, this view of what social science does, contributes, and brings to the table is quite limited. This WorldLeish7 panel aims to bring together a range of scholarly efforts that exemplify the work of academics exploring the social life of leishmaniasis in different contexts across the