Newsletter: December 2004
Nancy Vuckovic and Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editors
SMA Graduate Student Mentor Awards
Catherine Timura (Yale U)
The Society for Medical Anthropology Student Affairs Committee is pleased to announce the awarding of the First Annual SMA Graduate Student Mentor Award to Dr Joan Ablon, Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine in the School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco. The award was presented in San Francisco at this year’s AAA Annual Meetings during the SMA Business Meeting. It was developed to recognize excellence in graduate student mentorship and acknowledge the important contributions of medical anthropologists who have provided exceptional guidance and outstanding support to graduate students in this field. The award is aimed at senior or mid-career scholars who have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to teaching and mentorship throughout their careers, particularly those who have taken the time to thoughtfully and successfully guide their MA and PhD students through their field work experience, the thesis/dissertation-writing process and beyond.
Nomination letters in support of Dr Ablon were submitted by her former students. Her nominators acclaimed her ability to simultaneously provide excellent professional guidance and develop close supportive relationships with her students. One letter described her as, “in equal measures, (com)passionate ethnographer, path-breaking scholar of stigma and disability, committed action anthropologist, and mentor to generations of medical anthropology students, many of whom are now her colleagues in the discipline.” Another letter emphasized that she is, “a great friend, a role model: warm, supportive, caring, motherly, a good listener, generous, funny, down to earth, colorful, and with great stories.” Hearty congratulations to Dr. Joan Ablon for her significant achievement as a mentor in the field of medical anthropology.
For more information and details about the award, please visit: http://www.medanthro.net/awards/mentoring.html.
OMH Conference: Informed Consent and Racial & Ethnic Disparities in Health
Janelle Taylor (U Washington)
In late June, the Office of Minority Health, an office of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, convened a conference at Tuskegee University on “Strengthening the Process of Informed Consent to Address Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care and Research.”
The conference was organized on the understanding that the history of unethical research in the context of inequalities and oppression, most powerfully symbolized in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, has bequeathed U.S. society a legacy of mistrust of medicine that has far-reaching implications for medical research and the health of minority communities. Some of these implications include: difficulty in recruiting minorities as participants in clinical trials; reluctance by minorities to go to doctors or authorize surgery and other treatments; and low participation by minorities in organ donation efforts. The question that the conference posed was how to not only build trust in medicine in minority communities, but also how to improve the trustworthiness of medical providers and researchers. Thus framed, the project of strengthening “informed consent” in research and health care poses the challenge of how to protect and promote what organizers termed a “culture of trust” between health researchers and research volunteers, between health care providers and patients, and between research institutions/health care organizations and communities from which prospective research subjects and/or patients originate.
This invitational conference featured presentations by a strikingly diverse range of voices, including not only bioethicists, leading figures within DHHS and OMH, and scholars addressing relevant topics from within a variety of disciplines, but also family members of people harmed through participation in unethical research, service providers working in a variety of specific minority communities, historian James H. Jones, novelist and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, poet Lucille Clifton, and more. This event was part of a project whose ultimate goal is to formulate federal policy recommendations.
While I found the conference very interesting and fruitful, I was surprised and dismayed that I was the only medical anthropologist present. So many medical anthropologists have researched and written on issues relevant to health disparities and informed consent, that I am left wondering how to interpret the relative absence of our work from this discussion. What might we need to do to ensure that the perspectives, questions and insights of medical anthropology have as wide a reach and impact as possible?
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).