Author: jknopes

2016 Conferences in Medical Humanities and Social Medicine

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One of the running features here at the blog is a recurring series on upcoming conferences in fields of interest to our readers, namely medical anthropology, medical humanities, and other cultural studies of health and illness. In this installment, we present a master list of conferences in 2016 that span these disciplines or that encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the social study of medicine. All conferences are listed chronologically. Many of these conferences have abstract submission deadlines that are swiftly approaching: these dates are listed below in the description of each conference posting.

If you would like to add a conference or meeting to this list, please submit details via email to our social media editor, Julia Knopes, at jcb193@case.edu. We welcome postings for both domestic (USA) and international conferences.

2016 International Conference on Medical Humanities

March 11th-12th 2016

Warsaw, Poland

Details here.

This conference welcomes papers from all areas of medical humanities as well as medical anthropology, sociology, and medical education. Papers presented at the conference will be published in a collected volume. Deadline for abstract submission is January 20th 2016.

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SfAA 2016 Meeting Logo, via SfAA website.

Society for Applied Anthropology 2016 Meeting: SMA Co-sponsored

March 29th-April 2nd 2016

Vancouver, British Columbia

Details here.

The Society for Medical Anthropology is a co-sponsor of this year’s SfAA Meeting in Vancouver. Though the deadline for abstract submissions has passed, attendees can view the preliminary program for the conference here.

American Ethnological Society 2016 Meeting

March 31st-April 2nd 2016

Washington, DC

Details here.

Though this annual conference welcomes work in all aspects of cultural anthropology, this year’s meeting focuses on disorder and normativity: particularly salient themes in medical anthropology and social medicine. Deadline for proposal submission is January 31st 2016.

A Palpable Thrill: An Introduction to Medical Humanities 2016

May 6th-7th 2016

Hamilton, Ontario

Details here.

The organizers state that this event will be “an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to promote inclusion of the humanities in medical education and, conversely, encourage arts students and scholars to find salience and inspiration in medicine.” Deadline for abstract and other presentation submissions is January 15th 2016.

Medical Anthropology Young Scholars (MAYS) 2016 Meeting

June 23rd-24th 2016

Lisbon, Portugal

Details here.

MAYS, a network under the European Association for Social Anthropologists, is holding its annual meeting at the University of Lisbon. Meeting themes include intergenerations and temporality. Deadline for abstract submissions is February 7th 2016.

7th International Comics & Medicine Conference: Stages & Pages

July 7th-9th 2016

Dundee, Scotland

Details here.

This year’s conference will explore the nature of performativity and how comics engage with themes of clinical roles, medical spaces, and the body-as-stage. Deadline for abstract submission is February 12th 2016.

Book Release: Kleinman and Wilkinson’s “A Passion for Society”

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To herald in the New Year 2016, today we feature a book publication highlight of a new text in medical anthropology co-authored by Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry‘s 2016 Honoree, Arthur Kleinman. Read our editor-in-chief Atwood Gaines’ announcement of the annual honoree here.

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Image via UC Press website.

Out this month from the University of California Press is Arthur Kleinman and Iain Wilkinson’s A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering (paperback edition details here.) The book examines the concept of suffering as a broader social “problem,” both in the contemporary age and through history. The authors explore how notions of suffering and care are reflective of present social and moral conditions, and how social science as a profession responds to “social suffering.” They argue that enlivened discussions about care have invigorated a new approach to the study of suffering by social scientists, who no longer engage with human suffering dispassionately. This shift has widespread implications for an “engaged social science” that takes a humanitarian approach to analyzing, understanding, and ameliorating human suffering. The text will interest applied social scientists as well as medical anthropologists and scholars of social medicine, who study illness and social inequities both across time and in cross-cultural contexts. The book can be purchased in hardcover here.

About the Authors: Arthur Kleinman is a medical anthropologist and psychiatrist who serves as professor in the departments of Anthropology, Social Medicine, and Psychiatry, and Director of the Asia Center, at Harvard University. Iain Wilkinson is a sociologist and Reader in Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.

Winter 2015 Blog Update

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To our readers:

In light of upcoming holiday celebrations and university academic breaks, there will be no regular Wednesday posts to the blog through 2015 (12/23 and 12/30.) We look forward to the return of our weekly blog updates in January 2016, and encourage all of our readers to become acquainted with the new initiatives we have planned for CMP Social Media in the new year. You can learn more about our upcoming plans for the blog, our Twitter, and our Facebook accounts in this editorial update from the week of the AAA 2015 Annual Meeting.

We continue to invite our readers to consider submitting a guest commentary, post, or news piece to our blog. Details about these submissions can be found in the previous link to the editorial update. We are also pleased to feature books recently or soon-to-be published by our colleagues in medical anthropology, sociology, humanities, and social medicine. If you would like your book publication to be highlighted on our blog, you may submit information regarding book features to social media editor Julia Knopes at jcb193@case.edu.

Until we return to our weekly blog posts, we welcome you to read our latest installment of the journal (Volume 39 Issue 4, December 2015.) You can access the new issue and read abstracts of our recently published articles by clicking here.

Best wishes and Happy Holidays,

The Editorial Team at Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry

Issue Highlight: Vol 39 Issue 4, Stimulant Use in the University

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This blog post is the last in a three-part series highlighting our newest installment of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry (released December 2015) which readers can access here. This week, we explore Petersen, Nørgaard, and Traulsen’s research on the use of prescription stimulants amongst university students in New York City. The full article is available here.

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In recent dialogues on the widespread use of prescription stimulants amongst university students, drugs are often described as enhancing productivity or a student’s ability to successfully focus on academic work. However, Petersen, Nørgaard, and Traulsen found that university students in New York City often cited the use of these drugs as rendering their work more pleasurable, “fun,” and “rewarding.” Their study included 20 students spanning BA, MA, and PhD programs: representing a diverse sample that, in the aggregate, universally suggested that the use of stimulants in an educational setting was not centrally connected to academic output or production. This outcome, the researchers assert, complicates existing neoliberal readings of American personhood, premised on the idea that the self is primarily cultivated and disciplined through labor and individual productivity.

For example, rather than feeling shameful about using stimulants to improve study skills or produce better work, the students instead expressed guilt for enjoying their academic labors and for transforming “monotonous” and “boring” activities into an engaging experience. The “optimization” of the mind to perform intensive intellectual labor was not related strictly to productivity, which would evoke traditional neoliberal notions of the person-as-producer. Instead, the students described the drugs as optimizing pleasure first, which rendered them more productive as a secondary consequence.

Take this instance: a 32-year old PhD student, identified as Ben, reported using Adderall when he felt too “lazy” to initiate work. Rather than continuing by discussing the extent of his productivity while on the drug, he instead explains that the drug makes him eager “to tackle” his projects. This is often the case for students who struggle to find the desire to complete academic tasks that are not interesting enough to begin without being made pleasurable through stimulant use. Further, another student added that using stimulants helped him to “reconnect” with his interest in sociology during a difficult class on social science theory. In other cases, using Adderall kept students from being distracted from social media or entertainment websites: not because they lacked the inherent ability to be productive, but because without the drug, these sources of interest were simply more engaging than the work at hand. In other instances, students noted that stimulants made them feel more secure and positive about the quality of their work, and helped them to diminish the physical and mental stresses that came with “all-nighters,” or extended overnight studying stints.

Throughout all these cases, enhancement is not described as a means to make the human brain meet the demands of a “high-speed society.” Instead, “enhancement” relates to students’ satisfaction with their resulting work, to their enjoyment of otherwise “boring” tasks, and to reduced the negative psychosomatic effects of studying or working on a limited time frame.

The authors do not eschew the neoliberal model through these cases: indeed, they suggest that the use of stimulants does have cognitive effects that bolster students’ abilities to produce academic work. However, they note that we must complicate a strictly neoliberal model that would indicate that stimulants are employed by students strictly in order to achieve a certain amount of studying or to complete an assigned amount of work. Enhancement may include productivity, but for students who use stimulant drugs, it also involves increasing the pleasure of finishing intellectual labors, and decreasing the negative consequences of engaging in challenging or otherwise tedious academic work.

In this way, cognitive-enhancing drugs indeed fortify the mind and the conception of the self as a producer and academic laborer. However, they also shape human experience by altering students’ sense of confidence, their satisfaction with academic work, and their passion for their chosen topics of study. In these ways, enhancement drugs not only increase productivity in the neoliberal sense: they also broadly impact notions of pleasure and individual ability related to students’ quest to heighten academic production.

 

 

Issue Highlight: Vol 39 Issue 4, Incarceration & Medical Anthropology

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This blog post is the second installment of our three-part issue highlight on the new December 2015 issue of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry (the full issue is accessible here.) In this week’s blog, we examine Carolyn Sufrin’s article on the shared roles of clinicians and anthropologists working with incarcerated women in the United States.

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Clinician-anthropologists are in a unique position to lend voice to their participants and to care for their medical needs. For Carolyn Sufrin, who served both as a physician and an ethnographic researcher for incarcerated women in the United States, the clinical and anthropological roles intersected in deeply meaningful ways. Sufrin notes that in these dual roles, she observed with female prisoners and analyzed their experiences, and provided reproductive health care and delivering the same women’s babies in a county hospital, where imprisoned women gave birth. The women were alternately enrolled in Sufrin’s study upon ceasing to officially be her patients, or were individuals that Sufrin cared for during her tenure as their OB/GYN.

Sufrin uses her case as an example of how to interpret the ethical consequences of working as a clinician-anthropologist. Part of the challenge she faced as both a physician and anthropologist to the women was that IRB and HIPAA regulations divided the types of data she could use in her anthropological research. Though some details of her participants’ lives, such as past trauma or childhood abuse, were essential to their experiences as mothers and as incarcerated women, she could not use this data inasmuch as it had been shared with her in the context of a patient-practitioner interaction: in other words, it was considered classified personal health information that could not be subsequently utilized in her ethnographic research. These methodological hurdles, Sufrin explains, shed light on the complexities of what constitutes “sacrosanct” data. It also suggests how the safeguarding of medical data does not necessarily translate to the “protective” collection of ethnographic data which is not isolated to the case of individual patients, and which relies on knowledge of participants and their connections to other people (in this instance, to individuals in the participant’s life who had caused past psychological harm.)

Likewise, as stated earlier, relationships between the participant/patient and the clinician/anthropologist are another form of interpersonal connection which must be reconfigured depending on the nature of the exchange taking place. In Sufrin’s case, this meant being clear with her participants that– upon entry into her anthropological study– she was no longer their physician, and that the nature of their exchanges and their professional relationship would take a new form. She could share their information (albeit de-identified), unlike information drawn solely from their medical records or from an examination.

Yet here, Sufrin notes that the anthropologist– like the clinician– is still engaged in an ethic of care. For example, one of Sufrin’s former patients in the prison was charged with child endangerment after giving birth in an alley and handing her child to a stranger, unable to afford treatment at a hospital following her release from prison. The story made news headlines, and as public knowledge, was within the realm of information that Sufrin employed in her ethnographic analysis of reproductive health in the American prison system. However, Sufrin knew an added piece of information that was not already publicized from her interaction with the woman in prison: a clinical detail that she understood as a physician, but was shared during her time as an ethnographic researcher. This detail would have enhanced her analysis of the situation, but she chose to omit it out of concern that to publicize the detail would be to betray the woman’s trust in her as a researcher and as someone who served in the prison as a physician.

In other instances that Sufrin discusses, her role as both an anthropologist and clinician led the women she worked with in each capacity to feel as if she was especially attentive and caring. Rather than always relying on her medical authority, Sufrin underscores her decision to remain non-judgmental and supportive even when the women in her study had made potentially harmful choices; for example, she chose not to openly admonish a woman who was continuing to use crack upon release from jail, despite being thirty-two weeks pregnant. Sufrin notes that her silence hid her own frustration with this choice, but it strengthened the woman’s trust in her as an anthropologist and “as a doctor.”

In sum, these dual roles ultimately bolstered her relationships to the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women that she served. Thus, the author argues that both anthropologists and clinicians share an “ethic of care” in their relationships with research subjects or patients. This ethic involves a careful fostering of the professional, interpersonal connections that ethnographers make with research participants, or that physicians make with their patients. This care entails the protection of private information and the researcher/clinician’s conscious attendance to interpersonal exchanges that bolster the patient/participant’s trust in the clinician/anthropologist. Likewise, an analysis of the clinician role alongside the anthropological one demonstrates both the delineations between multiple forms of care and social connection, as well as the shared commitment in medicine and anthropology to the sensitive attendance to patient and participant experiences.

Issue Highlight: Vol 39 Issue 4, Posthumous Reproduction

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Our final issue of the year– Volume 39 Issue 4 December 2015– has just arrived. In our last blog post series for 2015, we begin with a three-part feature of the latest publications at the journal in this new issue. In addition to the article previews in this series, our readers can access the full issue here. In this post, we explore Yael Hashiloni-Dolev’s preliminary research on posthumous reproduction in Israel (full article accessible here.)

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Biomedicine, through its innovative application of technology, can reconfigure biological experiences in ways that alter or reinforce cultural beliefs surrounding life, death, reproduction, kinship, parenthood, and social roles. Most recently, this has become a central issue in the field of assisted reproductive technologies: where biomedical interventions potentiate new relationships between parents, families, and children. But while assisted reproductive medicine is often discussed in terms of generating life, these new generative technologies may also intersect with death in novel ways that challenge existing understandings of kinship and familial relationships.

Hashiloni-Dolev article studies Israeli lay perceptions of a new concept in assisted reproductive medicine called posthumous reproduction (PHR.) In sum, PHR entails the use of genetic material from deceased parents to conceive children after their deaths. This usually means a woman will opt to become artificially inseminated with a husband or partner’s sperm retrieved while the man was in a coma or vegetative state: however, it may also include the fertilization of a woman’s eggs, frozen while she was alive, and gestated in a surrogate mother. Even frozen embryos of two deceased parents (a mother and father) might be “adopted” and implanted into a female relative or another recipient, who subsequently gives birth to a child whose biological parents are no longer alive. This process also facilitates the possibility of posthumous grandparenthood, and indeed, some parents whose adult children have died may seek out PHR technologies (include allied technologies such as surrogacy) to produce grandchildren.

Israel is one of the few countries that permits some forms of PHR, and it is a progressive nation in terms of reproductive technologies: its state health system covers the costs of ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies) for couples who have difficulty conceiving. Although Israel does not permit all forms of PHR, it does allow for the collection of a man’s sperm upon a wife’s request to carry his child upon his death (what the author calls the “prototype scenario.”) In this regard, Israel served as a prime location for surveying participants and testing initial ideas about the public perception of PHR: a new frontier of ARTs yet to be studied in the anthropological literature.

Through 26 semi-structured interviews with newlywed or childless couples, Hashiloni-Dolev discovered that there were some inconsistencies between the Israeli PHR policies and the participants’ understanding of PHR technologies. For instance, the government stipulated that PHR could occur via the retrieval of sperm from a dying or recently deceased father upon the wife or female partner’s instruction. The policy states that the retrieval could occur given evidence of a man’s “presumed wish” that he would want his spouse or partner to carry his child after death. However, “wish” and “consent” were interpreted differently by men interviewed for the study. The men typically stated that while they would defer to their partner’s wishes to have a child after their death, they themselves were uncomfortable with the possibility of their partners having the child and being unable to “move on” should they pass away. In this instance, while the man’s presumed “wish” might not change a woman’s decision to retrieve his sperm posthumously, it does not mean the man would “consent” to the process if he were not already dead.

Conversely, consent becomes more complicated given the circumstances that typically surround the use of PHR. The man is presumably young, such that his female partner would be able to carry his child, and would have died suddenly: thus making it nearly impossible to obtain his consent unless he had already affirmatively offered it while still alive and healthy.

There were also issues related to the family life of a child born through PHR techniques. Both male and female participants worried about the emotional stability and security of children born out of such conditions, and expressed their concern with new policies being proposed that would allow for expanded posthumous grandparenthood rights. The participants believed that the decision to have children following the death of a spouse was between the couple, and was not between other family members. Likewise, many participants worried about the birth of a child as a living shrine to the deceased, rather than as a new and autonomous member of the family.

In these responses, it is clear that while both biomedical technologies and governmental policies may enable PHR to occur, the process is not always viewed in such liberal terms by individuals who could be most likely to use it. Posthumous reproduction thus supplies medical anthropologists and scholars of social medicine with a nuanced case of the cultural position of new technologies, and the concerns that individuals across cultures have with these new reproductive tools: particularly as they relate to consent, kinship, and the roles of parents.

 

Book Release: Crowley-Matoka’s “Domesticating Organ Transplant”

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Image via Duke UP

Image via Duke UP

Due for release in March 2016 from Duke University Press is Megan Crowley-Matoka’s Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico. The text explores the familial nature of kidney transplantation in Mexico, where the organs are donated between relatives rather than received by strangers. Crowley-Matoka also examines kidney transplant in Mexico beyond the family unit, assessing national pride in transplantation procedures performed at hospitals operated by the state. Through family and government, organ transplantation thus becomes an iconic procedure in Mexican society– both within the home and across the nation– that represents the curative promise of contemporary medicine. Crowley-Matoka’s ethnography highlights the relationships between embodied experience, domestic life, national identity, and clinical practice. This text will appeal widely to scholars who study biomedicine in the Americas, the connections between medicine and the state, and familial networks of caregiving.

About the author: Megan Crowley-Matoka is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University. You can access more details about her upcoming book here.

AAA 2015 & New Initiatives at the CMP Blog

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To our readers:

This week, many of you are attending the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Meeting in Denver, Colorado. From all of us at Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, we wish you safe travels to the conference and new knowledge and fresh insights upon your return.

Last year on the blog, the editorial staff took this week to thank our readers and to share with you the future directions of our social media in the coming year. We are grateful to all of our readers and followers for helping us foster an online community for medical anthropologists and our peers in allied disciplines, whether on our Facebook page, on our Twitter feed, or here at the blog. Thank you to all of our colleagues for sharing our posts, retweeting our links, and reading our features: from news updates, to conference postings, to book releases, and journal issue highlights.

In addition to these features, we are embarking upon two new initiatives on social media into 2016. The first is a new submission mechanism for book release updates on the blog. If you are an author of a new academic text in medical anthropology, social medicine, or medical humanities, let us know about your publication, and we will share it on the blog. We hope this new initiative allows us to showcase new and trending topics in the field, while it spreads the word about the research our readers and colleagues are carrying out across the globe.

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The second new initiative will include interviews with anthropologists, historians, and other scholars (including graduate students) about ongoing projects or newly published research. If you want to share your findings, introduce new theories or issues, or present new topics in the field, contact us to be interviewed. For both initiatives, please send requests and queries to our social media editor (Julia Knopes) at jcb193@case.edu. As always, books for review and academic articles can also be submitted to the journal proper. Please direct questions about journal submissions to managing editor Brandy Schillace at bls10@case.edu.

Lastly, we continue to accept guest blog submissions between 500-700 words in length on topics in medical anthropology, medical humanities, bioethics, and social medicine. Guest blog submissions may be submitted for review to our social media editor at the above listed address.

We look forward to sharing with you all of the changes and additions at CMP social media in the coming year.

Our best,

The Editorial Staff of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry

AAA 2015 Sessions: Medical and Patient Bodies

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This entry is our last in a three-part blog series on the upcoming American Anthropological Association (2015) meeting, to be held in Denver, CO from November 18th-22nd. Here we feature paper sessions on contemporary themes in medical anthropology and social medicine. This year, we showcased sessions on the anthropology of mental health care (read here) and on cultural approaches to food sovereignty and economies, featured last week. In this installment, we highlight three sessions on the theme of the medical and patient body. All sessions are listed chronologically by date and time.

Image via AAA Website

Image via AAA Website

The Politics of Health and Ritual Practices: Ethnographic Perspectives

Wednesday, November 18th from 2:00pm-3:45pm (details here.)

In this session, topics will include: health and religion in Putin’s Russia; rhetoric and biopolitics in local medicines of North India; hypochondria, somatic experience, and psychiatry in Soviet-era Bulgaria; and the implications of mortuary rituals in neoliberal Romania. These papers will particularly interest scholars who study the relationship between body and state, as well as those who examine the intersection of religion, health, and healing practice.

The Biosociocultural Trajectory of Stigma

Sunday, November 22nd from 10:15am-12:00pm (details here.)

Papers in the session will address stigma in the following contexts: methadone treatment in a Moldovan prison; HIV+ identities in intergenerational perspective; changes in HIV/AIDS stigma in Western Kenya; stigma and HIV/AIDS as chronic versus curable; obesity and depression in Puerto Rico; and de-stigmatization in massive weight loss. Through these presentations, the session will posit the medical body at the center of social discourses on stigma, illness, and treatment across cultures.

Micropolitics of Medical Life

Sunday, November 22nd from 10:15am-12:00pm (details here.)

This session spans topics such as: organ donation and the family in Japan; patient-centered approaches to biomedical readmission; infant health in El Salvador; translation and language in medical encounters; ethnographic research on contaminated water exposure and local treatments for infant diarrhea; dialysis and the family unit; and the connections between cells, culture, and knowledge-making. These papers will underscore the cross-cultural ties between body, biology, illness, culture, and daily life.

AAA 2015 Sessions: Food Sovereignty and Food Economies

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Last Fall 2014, we featured a series of blog entries highlighting sessions at the AAA 2014 Annual Meeting on topics of interest to our readers. This year, we feature sessions from this year’s AAA 2015 Annual Meeting, to be held November 18-22 in Denver, Colorado (more information here.) You can also browse another past installment of the blog, where we highlighted sessions on biomedicine and the body at the upcoming Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) meeting, also in Denver, to be held November 11-14 (details here.)

This week, we present three paper sessions on anthropological approaches to food sovereignty and food economies: topics that have been increasingly of interest to medical anthropologists who study related issues such as body image, preventative care, nutrition, and well-being. The sessions are organized chronologically by date.

Image via AAA Website

Image via AAA Website

Food Values in Europe: Sustainable Economies, Power, and Activism

Thursday, November 19th 8:00am-9:45am (details here.)

Topics in this session will include the decommodification of food and organic food supplies; organic food provisioning in Catalonia; food values amongst British-born African Caribbean peoples in the United Kingdom; food waste and recycling in southern Spain; food politics, communities, and the garden in the Czech Republic; sustainability in a Galician dairy farm; and food ideologies in an urban Portuguese garden. The session crosses numerous topics of study including European cultures, sustainability and the environment, cross-cultural food practices, green space and the role of the garden, and global nutrition.

Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty, Food Justice, and Food Citizenship

Friday, November 20th 1:45pm-3:30pm (details here.)

This session will include presentations on the following topics: agricultural activism in Cuba; food access amongst migrant farm laborers; food justice at the border of the United States and Mexico; food sovereignty in Mexico in popular narratives; food literacy amongst women in a food-insecure neighborhood; and an analysis of divergent perspectives on food justice. These papers will offer valuable perspectives on the role of food in disparities across economic classes and across national borders.

New Directions in Agriculture and Culture: The Convergences of Food, Labor, and Neoliberalism

Saturday, November 21st 8:00am-9:45am (details here.)

Presenters in this session will address: a case study in sustainable entrepreneurship; food sovereignty and food landscapes in Detroit, Michigan; labor and food in a Wisconsin farm-to-table network; Haitian farmers and socioeconomic change; technoscience, translation, and olive oil; seeds and labor on the shorelines of Turkey; and an ecological study of resistance and labor on a South African plantation. These sessions will appeal to scholars who work on economic anthropology, nutrition, or political ecology.