Newsletter: April 2004
Nancy Vuckovic and Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editors
The SMA column has lately been a victim of its own success. Already in two out of the first four months of this year, AN Managing Editor Stacy Lathrop has deemed two of our columns to be of sufficiently general interest that she has moved them to other more prominent sections of the publication. Thus, Helen McGough’s essay “IRBs and Ethnographers: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?” appeared in the Commentary section of the February issue, while “In Defense of the Sound Byte,” by Lynn M. Morgan and James A. Trostle, appears in the Public Affairs section of this month’s issue. As column editors, we find this gratifying recognition of the interest and importance of the topics that medical anthropologists are addressing in our column, and we are glad to see our contributors’ work gain a brighter spotlight on a bigger stage. It does, however, also leave us scrambling at the last minute to find other material.
This month, we have decided to highlight some especially exciting medical anthropology course syllabi. This seems to us an appropriate complement to Morgan and Trostle’s essay that was originally slated to appear in this space, because course syllabi are, like the Op-Ed pieces that Morgan and Trostle discuss, genres and venues for presenting insights from medical anthropology that garner little recognition and are not highly valued within our profession, even though they arguably “engage” a far broader audience, and with potentially greater impact, than the articles we publish. Most of the syllabi highlighted here are among those posted on the SMA website, at http://www.medanthro.net/academic/syllabi/index.html
Intersectionality and Women’s Health: Ethnographic Approaches to Race, Class, Gender, and “Difference”
Marcia Inhorn, U Michigan, 2003
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar is designed to explore in an in-depth fashion how the intersections of race/class/gender and other axes of “difference” (i.e., age, sexual orientation, disability status, immigrant status) affect women’s health in the contemporary United States. In this course, recent feminist approaches to intersectionality and “multiplicity of oppressions” theories will be introduced.
Anthropological Approaches to Institutions
Lorna A. Rhodes, U Washington, 2003
The first part of the course centers on enclosed forms of institutions – particularly prisons and asylums – and explores their history, effects, and centrality to contemporary theoretical work across several disciplines. In the second part of the course we extend insights gained from the total institution to more diffuse institutional structures and consider some contemporary situations that manifest aspects of the modern institutional form while departing from it in significant respects. Throughout, we will look at resistance and reform as integral to institutional history and practice.
The Social Roots of Health and Disease
Paul Farmer, Arachu Castro, Joyce Millen, and Heidi Behforouz, Harvard U, 2003
This course is intended for students interested in working with underserved populations in the United States and internationally. By closely examining pressing problems in global health, the course helps prepare students to become leaders in international health, and guides them in their efforts to improve the health conditions of those overburdened by poverty, marginalization and social injustice. By the end of the course, students will have gained an understanding of how social forces become embodied as pathologies and how specific political, economic and historic processes influence the distribution of disease among different populations.
Human Taxonomies and Bioscience: A Social and Cultural History of the New Genetics
in Relation to Race, Gender, and Other Distinctions among People
Professors Troy Duster and Emily Martin, New York University, 2002
The course will focus on recent developments in biotechnology such as the human genome project, exploring their impact on cultural concepts of race, gender, normality, abnormality, and reproduction. We will approach the topic historically, looking at the early history of the race concept in anthropology, the eugenics movement in the U.S., and eugenics in Nazi Germany. Then we will consider more recent anthropological and sociological accounts of race in relation to shifts in concepts and practices concerning the body brought about by molecular genetics and genetic screening. Sources will include historical materials, ethnographies, novels, and mass media, both print and film.
Please send substantive, provocative, and/or informative short essays (650 words or less), on our featured themes of “IRBs” and “the pragmatics of funding,” or other topics of interest, to the SMA Contributing Editors Nancy Vuckovic (nancy.vuckovic@kpchr.org) or Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)