update

This week on the blog we are featuring an interview with our newest addition to the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry editorial team, Monica Windholtz. Monica will be joining us as a Social Media Editor on the journal’s blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts this month. Monica has already been featured on the blog in July with her article highlight of “Engaging with Dementia: Moral Experiments in Art and Friendship,” available here. In this post, we learn about Monica’s background, academic interests, and her ideas for expanding the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry blog.

What is your academic background? How did you become interested in medical anthropology, medical humanities, and interdisciplinary cross-society research?

Currently I am a student at Case Western Reserve University in the Integrated Graduate Studies (IGS) program, working on both a Bachelor of Arts in Medical Anthropology, and a Master of Arts in Bioethics with a special focus on the Medicine, Society, and Culture track. I also will graduate with a minor in Sociology and a certificate in Global Health. My interest in these fields began with a study of Dr. C.W. Lillehei, an American heart surgeon who helped break ground in American heart surgery and the invention of the pacemaker. As I explored the connections between health care and people, I became fascinated with the intersections of policy, procedure, and the individuals they affect. I hope to use my knowledge of these intersections to promote people-oriented policy after attending law school.

2. What are your research interests?

My research interests include post-mortem uses of bones, cultural perceptions of death, health care policy and practice, the differences and inequalities in societal roles across the genders, and reproductive health. I am currently working on my senior capstone project: a literary review of the death rites of several cultures that considers the changes local rituals have undergone due to health problems, such as the effect of Ebola on Liberian burial.

3. What is your favorite running feature on the blog?

My favorite running feature on the blog is the “From the Archive” series, which features article highlights and from previous CMP journal issues. It is an interesting way to highlight what types of articles have been published in the journal that are still relevant for current readers, and connects blog followers with articles they may not have previously seen.

4. What new features or ideas will you bring to the blog?

I am looking forward to expanding on Sonya’s work connecting the journal’s articles to current events. As health is an ever-changing field and its interactions with society are always shifting, it will be exciting to highlight these connections. I would also like to provide blog readers with more external content from our contributing journal authors, such as with the University of Washington Today: Q and A with Janelle Taylor post, available here, that featured a video interview with Janelle Taylor, the author of the article Engaging with Dementia: Moral Experiments in Art and Friendship.

5. How does your unique perspective integrate with the goals of CMP?

People need to have access to relevant and validated knowledge, and a curious mind, before they can effectively implement positive and meaningful policy changes. CMP promotes the study and exploration of the types of knowledge vital to these goals. As a reader of the journal, I continue to learn a great deal about various cultures and their interaction with, and impacts on, health care. I am excited to help connect others with the articles and ideas published in CMP, and looking forward to working with the rest of the CMP editorial team!

This week, many of our readers (and staff members here in the office of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry) are attending the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. For those of you presenting, we wish you the best of luck in delivering thoughtful and productive presentations. To all attendees, we hope you have pleasant travels to the nation’s capital, and return from the conference with new knowledge and fresh ideas.

via Wikimedia Commons

Much like conferences in our field, CMP social media is a common space for intellectual inquiry about contemporary issues in anthropology. In the spirit of building this communal space electronically, we now invite our followers to submit approximately 500-word blog entries– ranging from brief commentaries on a research project, recent presentation, or reflections on topics in medical anthropology, medical humanities, and social medicine– to be considered for our blog.

We ask that submissions to the blog be widely accessible to readers across anthropology and the humanities: from advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, professors, as well as applied practitioners and interdisciplinary researchers. Accepted pieces will be posted here and shared via our Twitter account. This is an opportunity to showcase your work to new audiences and to gain valuable insight into producing widely accessible, digital scholarship. Please direct your submissions to Julia Balacko at jcb193@case.edu.

Thank you for following CMP social media. We look forward to receiving your guest blog submissions and hearing more from you about exciting new research from the AAA Annual Meeting.

Best Wishes,

The CMP Editorial Staff