Newsletter: February 2003
Nancy Vuckovic and Janelle Taylor, Contributing Editors
As contributing editors, we would like to share with you our vision of what we would like to see the SMA column become. First, we would like to present substantive discussion of questions of concern to medical anthropologists. Initial ideas include a column on IRBs, how they affect our work and how we should engage them, and another on how and for whom we write. Second, we would like the column to function as a portal to the SMA website (www.medanthro.net), which has been set up specifically to facilitate ongoing discussion of issues by the community of medical anthropologists. Publication deadlines weeks in advance of each issue prohibit us from giving you a recap of current discussion threads, but we will be able to highlight recent discussion themes, and to print your suggestions of additional issues for discussion on the Web.
Achieving both these goals depends, of course, on the active participation of SMA members. Please contact us with your suggestions, ideas, announcements and written contributions. See the next item in this month’s column for a specific request.
IRB Stories – Please Contribute
Institutional Review Boards (IRB) are
a fact of work for medical anthropologists working
in research and academic settings. IRBs—and
consequently we—must contend with increasing
concerns about patient and participant confidentiality,
and whether and just how confidential our data
really are. Furthermore, IRBs that commonly review
conventional medical research (e.g., drug studies,
trials of health interventions) may be unfamiliar
and uncomfortable with interview and observational
methods, requiring us to be thoughtful about our
explanations and to consider modifying our methods
to meet IRB requirements.
We are planning a future column discussing these issues, and welcome comments and stories about your experiences with IRBs. We’re looking for issues-related discussion (e.g., how do you protect your data from being subpoenaed?) and for stories about successful collaborations (e.g., how you addressed concerns about getting signed consents from everyone you observed in a public clinic). Please email your contributions to us at the addresses below.
Society for Applied Anthropology Meeting
The Society for Applied Anthropology will hold
its 2003 meeting March 19-23, 2003, in Portland,
OR. Medical anthropologists are traditionally
well represented in SfAA sessions, and this is
also the case with the upcoming meeting. Previous
joint SMA/SfAA meetings have been successful,
and SMA is looking forward to continued collaboration
on meetings with our SfAA colleagues.
New England Regional Conference on Medical
Anthropology
The Yale University Department of Anthropology
invites you to submit papers for presentation
at the second New England Regional Medical Anthropology
Conference to be held at Yale University April
5, 2003. Students, professors and practicing anthropologists
are invited as speakers and as participants in
this conference. The central topics of this conference
include: Methodologies of field research and analysis;
Collaboration and interdisciplinary work; Public
policies and medical anthropology; Bodies and
violence: from intimate to ethnic violence; Ethical
commitments and the researcher's role in intervention.
Deadline for submissions is February 15, 2003.
NIH Funding Opportunities
Some announcements of funding from the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) specifically acknowledge
the value of an anthropological approach to addressing
a given health problem. Most are not so direct,
however, and it takes some work to find announcements
that are seeking or are at least sympathetic toward
anthropological perspectives. Words such as “qualitative
methods,” “culture” or “social
science” are sometimes used as a gloss for
“anthropology” or “ethnography.”
A valuable resource for identifying announcements
pertinent to anthropologists and other social
scientists is the Behavioral and Social Sciences
Research Guide to NIH Grants, compiled and distributed
by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Research at the NIH (http://obssr.od.nih.gov/).
The office issues an email newsletter with links
to the full text of announcements. To join the
mailing list send an e-mail message to: listserv@list.nih.gov.
The subject line should be blank, and the message
should read subscribe bssr-guide-l [your full
name].
Please send your comments, contributions, news and announcements to the SMA Contributing Editors Nancy Vuckovic (nancy.vuckovic@kpchr.org) or Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu).