Interview With Ángela Cifuentes Astete

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Professor, Department of Humanistic Studies, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Santiago, Chile. Associate researcher, Transdisciplinary Laboratory on Social Practices and Subjectivity (LaPSoS), Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de Chile. External member, Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC), Universitat Rovira i Virgili, España

Ángela Cifuentes is a transdisciplinary researcher, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, holding PhDs in Social Sciences and in Medical Anthropology and Global Health. In recent years, she has focused on exploring experiences of anxiety, forms of affectation, and mental health care practices in contemporary Chilean universities shaped by neoliberal logic.

What is your article “The University Lives Anxiety and De-pression”: Diagnostic Uses and Affective Negotiations in Mental Health Care Services for University Students in Chile” about?

In this article, I explore how mental health problems are experienced and named in Chilean universities, especially in contexts marked by competition, performance, and inequality. Based on interviews I conducted with students and mental health professionals across three types of institutions, I analyze the everyday uses of diagnoses like “anxiety” and “depression.” I show that, both for students and for professionals, these diagnoses do not necessarily reflect clinical illnesses but often serve as ways of naming forms of distress tied to the demands of academic life. In many cases, they allow students to access institutional support or justify difficult decisions, such as taking a break or changing degrees. I argue that these diagnostic uses are also affective negotiations in response to pressures of academic performance and social adjustment, and they open space for imagining alternatives in the face of failure. Mental health in the university thus emerges as a complex, contested, and constantly shifting field.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

My experience as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in various public and private mental health institutions has shaped a critical lens on experiences of suffering, affects, and the modes of management and care within institutions, leading me to focus on their political, cultural, and socio-historical dimensions. I am interested in generating knowledge that enables a deeper understanding of complex phenomena and contributes to social transformation. Currently, I am particularly interested in continuing research on university mental health, especially how global mental health discourses are locally reconfigured in Chilean universities in the post-pandemic context, exploring the affects, interdependencies, and technical mediations that shape students’ everyday care practices.

What drew you to this project?

The article is based on part of the findings from my doctoral research. Initially, the project aimed to study so-called ‘anxiety disorders’ in the context of public health in Chile. However, during the course of my doctoral studies, various expressions of distress erupted in Chilean universities: first, in May 2018, feminist protests against abuse and gender-based violence within universities; and then, in April 2019 (just a few months before the ‘chilean social uprising’), protests demanding greater access to mental health treatment services in universities. In those protests, student banners—echoed in the title of my article—declared that ‘at university we live anxiety and de-pression.’ This shifted my attention toward the use of mental health language in expressions of discontent, the institutional management of anxious affects, and its relationship to performance demands in universities.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

This year, I’ve immersed myself in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, fascinated by her ability to imagine alternative forms of life, relationships, and vital persistence. Her literature has become a source of inspiration for rethinking research as a political gesture. After reading several of her science fiction novels, I’ve now begun reading the fantasy saga “The Earthsea Cycle” with my daughter. Musically, I tend to move between very different registers — from dense, dark sounds to fusions that open up to something more hopeful. Lately, while working, I’ve been listening a lot to Tigran Hamasyan, an Armenian jazz pianist whose music helps me stay grounded and focused. On screen, I’m watching the final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale”.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

The main conclusion I aim to convey through my work is that mental health in university settings cannot be understood or addressed solely through reductionist and biomedical perspectives—nor can it be fully captured by interpretations that frame it exclusively as a form of inescapable social control. My research shows that while diagnoses and expressions of distress often involve individualized uses, they also function as affective languages and negotiation strategies in response to the demands of neoliberal academia. The key takeaway I propose is to rethink university mental health as a situated, collective, and political issue that reflects structural forms of exclusion, precarity, and inequality. It is urgent that public policies and institutional interventions acknowledge this pragmatic-political dimension of diagnoses, and move toward co-constructed strategies that do not reduce the complexity of student suffering to the private or clinical realm, but instead open up spaces for listening, recognition, and transformation of the structural conditions that produce it.

Other places to connect:

Website

Interview With Christopher Chapman

Posted by matthewbmartinelli

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University; Postdoctoral Affiliate, University
of Oxford

I am a medical anthropologist and sociologist. My work explores the intricacies of health and medicine in the Asia-Pacific, focusing on how people care for each other and how these practices intersect with medical and social service systems.

What is your article “Yuri’s Story: Memory, Relational Healing, and the Reflexive Logics of Art Therapy in Japanese Clinical Psychology” about?

Child protection systems around the world utilize mental health professionals to conduct assessments and provide children with therapeutic care. Japan is no exception. But thinking about child welfare and mental health cross-culturally helps us appreciate the
social side of practices that are commonly seen as (or hoped to be) objective, technical, and universal. My article details how clinical psychologist Yuri learned how to use art therapy to improve her professional work with abused or neglected children. Yuri’s story inadvertently dug up her own painful memories. Her return to childhood through art therapy unsettled her worldview: was her clinical work actually for the children, or was it just for herself? Yet, Yuri renewed her sense of clinical will. Cathartic resolutions of distress may help care practitioners develop empathy and become better carers. This is how Yuri thought art therapy was innovative for mental health care.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

While I am originally from a small, rural town in the Northwestern U.S., my research training has taken me across the world, from Hawai‘i and Japan to the U.K. and Thailand. My experiences in these places shape my interests in how people think about and enact care—and the lived realities of how caregiving plays out.

What drew you to this project?

I always find myself drawn to the ‘in-between’ things, especially in medicine and culture. Child protection does not immediately bring things like clinics and hospitals to mind, but it is a critically important arena where decisions and actions have dire consequences for one’s health and well-being. Japan’s child protection system has been undergoing significant reform throughout the past decade, providing an even more complicated space to think about care and culture.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

While I am reading (and re-reading) chapters from my in-progress book, I also recently started re-reading the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey. It is a fun hobby, but for my work, it is also helpful in seeing how writers in other genres craft an argument, describe social life, and present information to the reader.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

I cannot stress enough the value of strong and long-term relationships in ethnographic work. Yuri’s story was not a single moment, but conversations at the office, meetings in the therapy room, and chats in coffee shops over a year. I learned some of the most moving parts of her life quite late into my fieldwork. It can take time to appreciate another person’s life, but taking small steps toward making a person feel wanted can go a long way in building a rewarding connection (like inviting someone to a cup of
coffee/tea).

Interview With Henry J. Whittle

Posted by matthewbmartinelli

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Doctoral researcher, Department of Anthropology and Sociology & Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA), SOAS University of London

Dr Henry Whittle is a psychiatrist and anthropologist in training. He began his research career using mixed methods to study food insecurity, before pivoting towards mental health rehabilitation after specialising in psychiatry. Following further training in medical anthropology, he is currently working towards a PhD at SOAS University of London.

What is your article “Ronaldo on the Clapham Omnibus: Complex Recoveries in Complex Psychosis“ about?

In the article, I think about what we mean by recovery in psychosis. I ask how it complicates our current understanding of recovery if we consider the experiences of people with the most complex forms of psychosis. These people are inadvertently excluded from much debate on this topic. Ethnography is one of the few ways that their experiences can be incorporated meaningfully. Drawing on six months of ethnography on an inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation unit, the article centres around a man I call Shepherd, whose journey to becoming a more confident, calmer, happier person looked very different to most portraits of recovery in the existing literature. This is important because our understanding of recovery shapes mental health policy in material ways. If we oversimplify recovery by missing people like Shepherd, we risk structurally undermining the interventions—including inpatient rehabilitation—that may be most effective in supporting them to live well.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I am a psychiatrist and anthropologist, still working through my training in both disciplines. I currently work in an Early Intervention in Psychosis service in London and I will be part of the new Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA) at SOAS University of London. My research interests broadly relate to the social, cultural, and structural influences on mental health care and recovery, particularly for people living with more severe and enduring mental illnesses. Above all, I am an advocate for using applied social science as a basis for dialogue with service users, clinicians, practitioners, relatives, carers, and everyone else invested in improving mental health services.

What drew you to this project?

I have been intrigued by inpatient units ever since I first started working in psychiatry. Even though things are a little different now from how they were in Goffman’s time, the ‘total institution’ was still the main conceptual apparatus I received from my professional training to think through these places. Contributing towards addressing that gap, even slightly, was part of my motivation for taking on this project. The other part was that I have always been drawn to working with people with complex psychosis. I have learned so much from them, mainly about the limits of my own frameworks and my own imagination, but also about the complex, conflicting, and sometimes unexpected roles that institutions play in their lives. This is poorly captured in a clinical evidence base that, on the whole, tends to privilege streamlined understandings and analytic closure. I thought that ethnography could be particularly useful here—to help us hold onto that complexity as we make pragmatic decisions about care.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

Music and sport are big parts of my life. Both were important for this study. I bonded with Shepherd over a shared love of sport, and when I think of Apollo Ward I mainly think of playing pool and taking requests to play music on my phone—Orbital, Ed Sheeran, the Darkness, and the Rolling Stones were the soundtrack to this study. So now I’m watching my beloved Liverpool play football again after celebrating England Lionesses win the European Championship, and I’m listening to a lot of exciting British and Irish post-punk bands—Big Special, Wet Leg, and Sprints at the moment. I also recently started reading The Brown Sahib Revisited by Tarzie Vittachi, a searing takedown of the legacies of British colonialism in South Asia that was a wonderful gift given to me by my mentor and friend Sushrut Jadhav.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

That we need to take people’s ambivalent feelings and contradictory dispositions towards mental health services seriously in imperfect systems, even if it makes us uncomfortable. These contradictions may be our only glimpses of the life-sustaining roles that some institutions play in people’s lives. That is not to say that we should avoid radical critique, just that we need to proceed with caution. It is easy to miss complexity in this field, and missing complexity has material consequences that tend to impact the most marginalised people disproportionately.

Interview With Talia S. Katz, PhD

Posted by matthewbmartinelli

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Assistant Professor of Israel Studies, State University
of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton

Talia Katz is a cultural anthropologist whose research
intersects the medical humanities, childhood studies, and gender studies. Her first book project, A Healing Stage: Violence, Self-Knowledge, and Therapeutic Theater in Israel, is a historical and ethnographic study of psychodrama in Israel, focusing on the mixed Jewish-Palestinian city of Lod.

What is your article “A Ring Transforms: Children Learning Life and Death in Lod” about?

My article develops an ethnographic method of attending to children’s voices, showing how what I call the ‘fragmented’ texture of children’s knowledge yields new insights about Israeli society and its conflicts. The article is based on sixteen months of participant observation at a community theater center in Lod, Israel. Taking elementary school children as ethnographers, I show how their play reveals that they learn political violence not as a specific event but rather as part of the conceptual structure of their world. This finding is particularly important for debates on trauma in the social sciences, illustrating how the biomedical focus on the etiological event can eclipse foundational ways in which violence shapes one’s self and world.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University, I use
ethnographic methods to ask questions about health, illness, trauma, and subjectivity. At its core, my research seeks to understand how both psychological experts and everyday people respond to the marks of violence on their milieu. I am interested in what repair looks like from the perspective of the everyday and how the frameworks I encounter in my fieldwork differ from dominant legal and biomedical model.

What drew you to this project?

Having grown up in a household shaped by chronic illness and migration, I have always been passionate about how children put together that which adults, for one reason or another, may not share directly. When I began exploratory research for my dissertation, I learned that the Lod Theater held a weekly
children’s theater group. It seemed like a natural fit for the dissertation research – a chance to empirically study questions towards which I already had an affinity.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

A colleague introduced me to the powerful and beautifully written book Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza. I appreciated the astute rendering of how grief reverberates through kinship relations and reflections on subjectivity.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

Often adults – whether clinicians, educators, or care-givers – will ponder how best to explain X event or X challenge to a child. My research points to the ways in which children are already putting such knowledge together, whether adults have the courage to recognize this or not. Shifting the questions we ask about children’s knowledge can meaningfully reshape our understanding of what constitutes an adequate response.

Other places to connect:

Twitter: @TaliaSKatz

Website

Interview With Jennifer Karlin

Posted by matthewbmartinelli

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Associate Professor, University of California-San
Francisco

Dr. Jennifer Karlin is an Associate Professor at UCSF. With fellowship
training in family planning and clinical medical ethics and a PhD in anthropology and history of medicine, Dr. Karlin is a researcher and full-scope family physician whose work aims to find ways to empower people through their healthcare experiences.

What is your article “Intimacy, Anonymity, and “Care with Nothing in the Way” on an Abortion Hotline” about?

The article explores the operations and emotional dynamics of a reproductive health hotline. It examines how the hotline offers intimate, yet anonymous support to individuals seeking information about miscarriages and abortion. This support system is characterized by a non-judgmental and compassionate approach, providing “care with nothing in the way.” The hotline serves as a crucial lifeline, offering both emotional support and vital information during a potentially distressing time for callers. Despite the anonymity, the interactions create a safe and supportive environment where callers can freely express their concerns and receive guidance without the fear of stigma or judgment. Volunteers on the hotline often find the experience more rewarding and impactful compared to in-clinic care, as they can connect deeply with callers in a unique and supportive manner without having the regulatory climate that often can cause additional trauma to people seeking in-person care through more formal networks.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

As a board-certified family physician and fellowship-trained family-planning specialist, my research bridges clinical practice with anthropological inquiry to enhance person-centered care for historically underserved populations. My background in anthropology and history of medicine informs my understanding of how social, political, and institutional structures shape health care experiences. I investigate a range of topics, including rheumatoid arthritis, grief, end-stage renal disease, reproductive and sexual health, and community engagement in medical research. My work emphasizes ethically informed care, empowering individuals through biopsychosocial analysis, patient-care team dynamics, and structural aspects of health systems. In reproductive health, I focus on de-medicalizing contraceptive methods and abortion care to reduce stigma. Additionally, I examine access to care for vulnerable populations and the incorporation of DEI initiatives in medical education. Through interdisciplinary research, I aim to improve complex disease management and promote equitable health care by challenging and reimagining traditional norms and structures.

What drew you to this project?

I was inspired by this project because of my long-standing interest in understanding and improving person-centered care for historically underserved populations. This was a natural field site to explore my commitment to de-medicalized and de-stigmatized care. This hotline offered an invaluable opportunity to examine how intimate, anonymous support can profoundly impact individuals seeking abortions, providing insights into creating more compassionate and accessible reproductive health services in all settings. Additionally, my interest in how social, political, and institutional structures affect health care experiences motivated me to think about how hotlines can serve as crucial resources within these contexts.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

I just started reading ‘High Magick’ by Damien Echols, which explores the spiritual practices Echols
developed while wrongfully imprisoned for murder. A marathon swim group recommended it to me for
its mental training techniques, as I am currently preparing for a 21-mile open water swim.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

A main action takeaway from the paper “Intimacy, Anonymity, and ‘Care with Nothing in the Way’ On an
Abortion Hotline” is the recommendation to support and expand support for informal structures of care.
The hotline provides a crucial space for individuals to receive compassionate, non-judgmental support
and guidance in a stigmatized and often challenging context. The anonymity and intimacy offered by
these services can significantly improve the quality of care and emotional support for those pregnant
people, emphasizing the importance of such resources in reproductive health care systems.

Other places to connect:

Website

Interview With Galia Plotkin-Amrami

Posted by daisyf1a873efbd8

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Galia Plotkin-Amrami, Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Education, University of Ben-Gurion in the Negev, Israel

Galia Plotkin-Amrami’s academic track began with training in anthropology and school counseling and evolved into historical anthropological research on therapeutic discourse during her PhD and several years thereafter. Her more recent research focuses on the medicalization of childhood, parental subjectivity, and stigma in relation to neurodevelopmental disorders and atypical gender performance.

What is your article “Sensitive Child, Disturbed Kid: Stigma, Medicalization, and the Interpretive Work of Israeli Mothers of Children with ADHD” about?

The article focuses on Israeli mothers of children with ADHD. We explored how mothers understand the category of ADHD, their children’s experiences, and their own role over the course of their children’s lives. Our analysis of mothers’ narratives revealed they did not experience the formal diagnosis as an endpoint that settled the understanding of the child’s condition. Rather, they continued to revisit their perceptions of ADHD and their own responsibilities. As an invisible, yet socially disturbing disability, the diagnosis of ADHD does not bring relief from blame. We discuss some features of the Israeli cultural portrait of the child with ADHD that differ from aspects of the ADHD life experience that are emphasized in ethnographies in North American families. We show that emotional vulnerability and risk of social isolation of the child reflect cultural notions of Israeli childhood and shape Israeli mothers’ experiences and decisions related to the child.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

For several years, my main research interest was mental health knowledge and practices in the areas of immigration, trauma treatment, and resilience education. I explored the interrelations between professional knowledge, national ethos, religious narratives, and ethics in the Israeli cultural and political context.

I have begun exploring a different topic—the medicalization of childhood. My recent project focuses on how parents and teachers understand and apply the ADHD category within the school and family context in Israel. In addition, I conduct research with colleges on homeroom teachers’ roles and perceptions of mainstreaming students with emotional-behavioral difficulties within the regular school setting.

Another research project focuses on the parenting of transgender and gender-variant children. It examines how children’s atypical gender performance and gender transition are navigated in the family and school arenas within different educational settings in Israel: Jewish state (secular) schools, Jewish state-religious schools, and independent schools.

What drew you to this project?

The idea of this project emerged from my teaching. My general interest in diagnostic categories and “making up people” led me to teach on the subject. Based on discussions with my students and the understanding that there is no anthropological-historical research in Israel, a highly medicalized society, on medicalization of childhood, I thought it would be appropriate to study the topic. The project focuses on the knowledge and practices of mothers of children with ADHD and teachers who meet such children in the school arena, but I intend to continue to study medicalization, this time by exploring the epistemic culture of the experts involved in diagnosing and treating the disorder among children in Israel. My previous projects on professional discourses in the field of trauma or immigration showed the importance of an anthropological examination of processes of knowledge–generation on mental phenomena. After studying the narratives of mothers and teachers, I see great value in research on medicalization at different levels, macro and micro, institutional and interactive, through the knowledge of formal experts and the expertise of laypeople. Ultimately, the role of mothers or teachers is critical in medicalization processes and, more generally, in the way we understand the concept of disability, norm, and pathology and perceive personal and social responsibility. I hope to continue this research in order to produce additional insights into the uniqueness of the globalized tendency of medicalization in a local context.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

One of the interesting findings for me was the variety of the effects of diagnoses and biomedical explanations on people’s lives and subjectivity and how important it is to pay attention to the narrative, institutional, and moral effects of the diagnosis. For the mothers in our study, the diagnosis of ADHD allowed them to achieve very different goals and was translated into very different decisions, moral experiences, and practices. In addition, we saw the extent to which local perceptions of childhood, well-being, and normative functioning shaped mothers’ decisions to diagnose their children and influenced their interactions with professionals and educators.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I’ve been listening to a local podcast “On Life and Death.” This podcast is built on an Israeli journalist’s in-depth interviews with people of different ages, mostly writers or those who write, about their experiences of loss at different stages of their lives, their insights around grieving, commemoration, and life, and their moral significance. I began to listen this podcast after a loss in my personal life. I find it sensitive, humane, wise, and entertaining.

I am also listening to an audio book by Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. I was born in the Former Soviet Union and left a few years after Perestroyka. I find this to be a fascinating chronicle about how everyday Russian citizens recount their past: what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it was like to live in the new, post-Soviet Russia.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

In the uncertain spaces of controversial diagnostic categories, such as ADHD, there is a need to respect and take into account mothers’ daily experiences and knowledge to create and maintain an inclusive environment for “troubled” children, on the one hand, and to challenge common cultural expectations from mothers, on the other.

Other places to connect:
Websit e

Interview With Tomás de la Rosa

Posted by daisyf1a873efbd8

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Tomás de la Rosa completed his doctorate in neuroscience at Federal University of São Paulo (Brazil) and is now a postdoctoral fellow at neuropsychopharmacology research group at the University of Cadiz (Spain). From his biological background, he also brings a particular interest in the philosophical and sociological dimensions of neuroscientific research, through the lens of critical and decolonial theory.

What is your article “Necropolitics of Death in Neurodegeneration” about?

Neurodegenerative diseases are becoming more common as the global population ages, posing significant challenges for medicine. These diseases are progressive, long-lasting, and often lead to higher death rates. Research and medical practices are often influenced by power and politics, which can impact patient care. Drawing on ideas from philosophers Foucault and Mbembe, our article examines how aging, neurodegeneration, and death are managed. We argue that power dynamics shape the way knowledge about these diseases is produced, often overlooking the role of mortality. We also highlight the impact of colonialism on this knowledge, emphasizing its importance when considering death in these contexts.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

My primary training and research have focused on neuroscience and animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders. However, despite my background in basic biological and experimental research, I have been interested in the sociological and epistemological aspects of our laboratory practices since my PhD. It was during this time that I began to conceptualize a project exploring the politics of neurodegeneration.

What drew you to this project?

During my thesis in the neuroscience department at Universidade Federal de São Paulo, I studied cardiac and respiratory functions in an animal model of Parkinson’s Disease. The main goal was to explore the connection between neurodegenerative processes and these vital functions. This idea stemmed from epidemiological observations of increased sudden cardiac death in this population, an issue often neglected in neurological research. At that time, I began to familiarize myself with the work of Nikolas

Rose, who explores the politics of modern biotechnology. His work inspired me to investigate the formation of the discourse around neurodegeneration, from in vitro studies to clinical practice and broader societal implications.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

One of the most intriguing findings was the contrast between biopolitical and necropolitical deployments within biomedicine, highlighting different individuals and discourses. This phenomenon is not exclusive to neurodegenerative diseases or neurology. Through our study, we observed how some biopower mechanisms, designed to increase life expectancy, are developed within the same epistemological biomedical framework and spaces, such as hospitals, as necropower mechanisms aimed at erasing certain populations. In our view, this heterogeneous nature of power reflects the territorial and social organization and governance in liberal and colonial societies.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I am currently immersed in Ana Maria Gonçalves “Um defeito de cor.” It offers a profound exploration of the Brazilian experience of slavery, told not through official historiography but through the perspective of an African woman searching for her long-lost son. This narrative exemplifies storytelling from the periphery, a theme we emphasize in the final section of our article.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

Recognizing how biomedical technologies are developed and articulated within a monolithic narrative of health and disease, that is necessarily incomplete and partial. A decolonial turn may help us decenter this narrative and include new ways of knowing and doing, accordingly to the multiple ways of being that exist.

Other places to connect:
Website

Twitter

Special Issue Interview: Sarah S. Willen, Kristina Baines, and Michael C. Ennis-McMilllan

Posted by taylorshimizu

The following article is part of the Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry March 2024 special issue, “Student Experiences of Covid-19 around the Globe: Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project” which is guest edited by Heather M. Wurtz, Katherine A. Mason, and Sarah S. Willen.

This special issue explores how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the mental health and wellbeing of high school and college students in diverse locations around the world. The collection analyzes data collected by the Pandemic Journaling Project, a combined research study and online journaling platform that ran on a weekly basis from May 2020 through May 2022, and from complementary projects. Contributions draw on a range of data including PJP journal entries, semi-structured interviews with PJP participants, autobiographical writing by students, and conversations about engagement with PJP in classroom and community-based settings. This week we feature a brief blog post by the authors of “Cultivating Voice and Solidarity in Times of Crisis: Ethnographic Online Journaling as a Pedagogical Tool”.

This article is by:
Sarah S. Willen, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Connecticut
Kristina Baines, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY) Guttman Community College and affiliated faculty at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy
Michael C. Ennis-McMillan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Skidmore College

Photo 1: Skidmore College students, isolated in quarantine, viewing campus activities from a window (2022).

What is your article “Cultivating Voice and Solidarity in Times of Crisis: Ethnographic Online Journaling as a Pedagogical Tool” about?

In our piece, we discuss how online journaling – in general, and using the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) platform in particular – became useful for teachers and students at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our essay synthesizes a series of conversations among three educators who specialize in medical anthropology: one of PJP’s co-founders and two anthropology faculty who taught with PJP in multiple classes at their respective institutions. We show how PJP gave students a chance to use ethnographic approaches to document their pandemic experiences – not just for themselves, but also as a forward-looking form of “archival activism.” At a time when participant-observation and other traditional teaching strategies had become impossible, PJP helped students learn from, connect with, and think critically and analytically about the pandemic experiences of people who were both similar to and also very different from them.

Tell us about how this project came to fruition.

After learning that both Kristina and Michael had begun teaching with PJP, Sarah brought the crew together for a sustained conversation that started with one-on-one conversations, followed by an online panel about the pedagogical value of online ethnographic journaling (at the 2021 Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meetings) and eventually the three-way dialogue that became this co-authored essay.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

We were struck by the ways in which ethnographic journaling can help students appreciate what it means to bring your “whole self” to your ethnographic work – and how doing so can create new forms of data and insight, challenge mainstream misconceptions, help ease distress, and even – in some instance, have therapeutic benefit. Students documented a range of critical and creative pandemic responses that broaden understanding of a global health emergency.

Who might be interested in reading your piece?

We expect that anyone who lived through the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially people who were either students or educators (or both) during that time, will see aspects of their experience reflected in the piece. We hope that students who read it will come away with a better understanding of how much teachers scrambled to understand students’ experiences, connect with their students, and teach well under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. And we hope that educators who read the piece, especially those in anthropology and other qualitative social sciences, will see how online ethnographic journaling can serve as a valuable teaching and learning tool and that students’ voices offer valuable contributions to studies of pandemics.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from this work, what would it be?

We recognize that lots of people don’t want to think about COVID anymore, or think about it right now. But when you are ready to think about it, we think our piece can offer useful insights on the value of online journaling in classroom settings. We also think it can help folks see the value of bringing PJP’s searchable Featured Entries page into your own teaching and learning experiences. In addition, our article will orient future scholars now that the PJP archive (housed at the Qualitative Data Repository) is open to external researchers.

Special Issue Interview: Cristopher Bogart Márquez Rodríguez

Posted by taylorshimizu

This special issue explores how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the mental health and wellbeing of high school and college students in diverse locations around the world. The collection analyzes data collected by the Pandemic Journaling Project, a combined research study and online journaling platform that ran on a weekly basis from May 2020 through May 2022, and from complementary projects. Contributions draw on a range of data including PJP journal entries, semi-structured interviews with PJP participants, autobiographical writing by students, and conversations about engagement with PJP in classroom and community-based settings. This week we feature a brief blog post by the authors of “The Eschucha (Listen) Podcast Project: Psychosocial innovation for marginalized Mexican youth and young adults”.

This article is by:
Cristopher Bogart Márquez Rodríguez, Master’s student in Psychosocial Intervention, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Colombia

What is your article “The Eschucha (Listen) Podcast Project: Psychosocial innovation for marginalized Mexican youth and young adults” about?

The “Escucha” (Listen) Podcast Project” describes an innovative intervention project based in Mexico City, which sought to provide psychosocial support for young people in contexts of social exclusion. Youth participation in the project entailed weekly journaling with the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP) — an online journaling platform and research study. Youth also engaged in weekly phone conversations with a member of the intervention team to give youth a space to express themselves and reflect on their lives and experiences. Regular and frequent communication with youth participants throughout the project helped foster a sense of trust towards the intervention practices and the intervention team. The project culminated in the creation of a podcast, in which each participant created a 2-5 minute chapter for the podcast about their experiences during the pandemic.

Tell us about how this project came to fruition.

Violence in Mexico has grown exponentially in recent years; one of the population sectors hardest hit by increasing violence is young people — especially those who live and coexist in contexts where violence is the daily norm. This sector is particularly vulnerable to different types of risks linked to material conditions and poverty. Despite increased need, there is a lack of emotional and therapeutic support programs that operate in marginalized communities. In my experience of around 13 years working with vulnerable groups, acting early can help prevent the reproduction of violent behavior. One of the objectives when intervening within these communities is to trigger cognitive processes that promote critical perspective of structural inequity, help youth reevaluate their abilities and potential, and strengthen their self-esteem. Bringing together the easy-to-use, digital platform of PJP with our own psychosocial tools allowed us to engage youth in these cognitive processes through dialogue, writing, and other creative outlets.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

One of our most interesting and important observations during the course of the project was the impact of the intervention on participants’ sense of wellbeing, as they described in both one-on-one conversations with team members, as well as in their journals. For young people who contend with overlapping forms of exclusion, it can be difficult to help them gain access to and engage in therapeutic spaces. But feeling truly listened to, for youth, can have a far-reaching effect. One of the project participants who had been incarcerated prior to the project and found the intervention particularly insightful, commented to an intervention team member: “If I had done something like this when I was younger, if someone had listened to me like this, with attention and without judging me, maybe my life would have been different.”

Who might be interested in reading your piece?

This article will be of interest to health professionals attracted by research and development of innovative, non-traditional projects aimed at young people in contexts of social exclusion.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from this work, what would it be?

We can conclude by recognizing the impact of creatively-driven, contextually appropriate mental health interventions for youth. Socio-emotional work with young people in marginalized contexts in Mexico is not common, however, providing alternatives for support and professional accompaniment – as was done through this work – has made a notable difference in strengthening self-esteem among the youth participants.

Special Issue Interview: Katherine A. Mason and Jianmei Xie

Posted by taylorshimizu

This special issue explores how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the mental health and wellbeing of high school and college students in diverse locations around the world. The collection analyzes data collected by the Pandemic Journaling Project, a combined research study and online journaling platform that ran on a weekly basis from May 2020 through May 2022, and from complementary projects. Contributions draw on a range of data including PJP journal entries, semi-structured interviews with PJP participants, autobiographical writing by students, and conversations about engagement with PJP in classroom and community-based settings. This week we feature a brief blog post by the authors of “Seesaw Precarity: Journaling Anxious Hope on a Chinese University Campus During Covid-19”.

This article is by:
Katherine A. Mason, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Brown University
Jianmei Xie, Lecturer in Second Language Education, School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University

Photo 1: Photo from journal entry by study participant, April 14, 2022, Guangzhou, China

What is your article “Seesaw Precarity: Journaling Anxious Hope on a Chinese University Campus During Covid-19” about?

“Seesaw Precarity” is based on the Covid-19 experiences of a group of Chinese university students. We draw on journal entries that the students submitted to the Pandemic Journaling Project to argue that these students spent most of their undergraduate years living in a state of “seesaw precarity.” We define seesaw precarity as a long period during which many people in China were unable to predict from one day to the next whether they would be free to engage in the ordinary, everyday activities of everyday life. We trace student reactions and adaptations as they struggled to attend class, buy food, and see friends and family in the midst of unpredictable swings between openness and closedness. The seesaw nature of restrictions spurred anxiety among the students we followed, but also produced an optimistic mindset we refer to as “anxious hope.”

Tell us about how this project came to fruition.

This project resulted from a partnership between the co-authors that traces back to 2002, when we first met in Guangzhou, China to do a Chinese-English language exchange. We became friends and then colleagues and have kept in close touch over the years. We kept in touch during the pandemic, and we knew from our own correspondence that both professors and students were having really different experiences in China vs. the US. When Heather and Sarah and I (KAM) decided to put together a special issue on student experiences of the pandemic, I (KAM) thought immediately of reaching out to Jianmei (JX) to see if she’d be interested in writing something. She was, and we began meeting to put together the project that forms the basis for the paper. It’s been such great fun collaborating on this project and this article after so many years of more informal collaborations!

*Photo 2: Photo from journal entry by study participant, April 10, 2022, Guangzhou, Chin*

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I think both of us were pretty surprised at just how resilient the students we followed seemed to be during all of the crazy ups and downs of the pandemic in China. Jianmei had noticed and remarked on this before we even started the project, as she worked very closely with dozens of Chinese undergraduates during this time and frankly was amazed at how much better they seemed to be handling things than the adults in her life! We had talked about this before and then both observed it strongly in the data. The students were definitely struggling, and periodically did get upset, but they were really determinedly optimistic about the whole thing in ways that were quite inspiring.

Who might be interested in reading your piece?

I think our piece should be of interest to anyone who would like some deeper insights into lived experience during the pandemic in China. We get such a stilted, superficial view of people’s lives there through US media, and the focus is almost always on negative experiences and on resistance. Our article certainly doesn’t discount people’s negative experiences, but also provides a bit of a more well-rounded sense of the full lives people were leading, and how they managed to find joy in addition to the sorrow. We also provide some insight into why there was relatively little resistance to harsh control measures in China during the first two years of the pandemic.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from this work, what would it be?

One big takeaway from this article is that people can handle an awful lot of uncertainty even over long periods of time, if they have faith in the system and are able to experience their chaotic situation as something that will make them stronger rather than break them. But this ability and willingness to weather a lot has limits. A lot of people started to hit their limit in China in late 2022, when the really strict control measures that they were living with started to work less and less well in controlling the virus, and the cycles between locking down and opening up became more frequent and more extreme.