Newsletter: November 2006
Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editor
Your Newly Elected SMA Executive Board Members:
Kitty K. Corbett (PhD, University of California Berkeley & San Francisco, 1986; MPH, University of California Berkeley 1980) writes: I'm pleased to serve as SMA Treasurer. My career focus emphasizes bringing anthropology into public and population health endeavors. My projects target health communication, participatory community based programs, tobacco, HIV/STD, and antibiotic use. After California and Colorado, I am now Professor in Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. I've worked internationally in Peru, Moscow, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Mexico. I support SMA's outreach to anthropologists plus others who are diverse in their backgrounds and interests but have overlapping goals.
Ellen Gruenbaum is Professor at California State University, Fresno and does research on health issues of Muslim women in Sudan, especially female genital cutting. In 2004 she was Visiting Professor at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan, and she studied the Sudanese feminist movement and the process of abandonment of FGC in rural communities. She also served as a research consultant to both UNICEF and CARE on female genital cutting abandonment projects in Sudan. She authored The Female Circumcision Controversy(U. Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and a recent article on sexuality issues in Medical Anthropology Quarterly (March 2006). She looks forward to compiling a historical perspective on the SMA and helping to shape its future.
Alan Harwood writes: After completing my doctorate, I wanted to know if anything I’d learned in 25 years of formal education had any use in the world. I therefore joined the research team of a primary health care program. This launched me as a “medical anthropologist,” though I often resist that designation, considering myself a social anthropologist who has worked on health-related topics. In retirement I’ve been investigating the social history of the development of anthropology as an academic discipline in Britain. This quest has often led me away from the intellectual luminaries we read as students to minor figures who were politically important in this development.
Lenore Manderson is Professor at Monash University and holds an inaugural Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship, under which she is conducting research on chronic illness, disability, social relationships and well-being in Australia and Southeast Asia. The Federation Fellowship program comprises a series of related and complementary projects. It aims to contribute substantially to understanding how, in different cultural, social and economic settings and under different, more immediate circumstances, embodied experience, ideas of the self, and social relationships and their meanings, are revised and restructured as a result of corporeal change. Professor Manderson has been elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and of the World Academy of Art and Science in recognition of her work exploring the social consequences and policy implications of knowledge.
Carolyn Sargent is Professor of Anthropology at SMU. She is engaged in research on reproductive strategies of West African migrants in Paris, France. This research focuses on how the state politics of immigration plays out in routine practices of the public hospital system and on the ways in which Islam serves as an idiom for debating migrant women’s increasing autonomy in France. The research documents how local, state and global processes such as transnational migration, the dominant discourse of fertility control, and variable interpretations of Islam shape reproductive interests and migrant family dynamics in France and in societies of origin. However, creative acts of agency, negotiation, and resistance emerge in the context of powerful structural constraints.
Carolyn Smith-Morris writes: My research has focused on the health impacts of culture change in indigenous and minority groups, with my first monograph describing the epidemic of diabetes among Pima Indians of Southern Arizona. I am now collaborating with an endocrinologist to consider the pathways linking perceptions of stress to insulin resistance and other precursors of chronic disease. As the current chair of the Council on Anthropology & Reproduction (CAR), I have cut my teeth on advocacy and research translation for reproductive rights policy debates. I hope to apply those lessons more broadly through the SMA in the coming years.
Please send column contributions to the SMA Contributing Editor, Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)