In this short piece, I explore how medical anthropology could be deployed through interdisciplinary collaborations in a way that is both theoretically rich and poised to positively impact health outcomes. In particular, I consider how research agendas focused on improving health care outcomes reveal certain limitations and underlying assumptions within the discipline. What types of methodological shifts might occur if …
Category Archives: Lectures
PrEP at the Margins: Towards a Critically Applied Anthropology of Nordic PrEP Access
This article is part of the series: A 'Critically Applied' Approach to PrEP
In the spirit of this series on a ‘critically applied’ approach to PrEP, this piece shows how thinking with the concept of marginality can contribute to an analysis of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and how this new HIV preventive technology can help us uncover issues of health disparities, even in spaces of affluence with state-provided health care. More specifically, this piece …
homunculus Revolts: Re-Figuring the Neurological Subject
Figuring a Grotesque Norm
1954 Homunculus: Penfield Archives, Osler Library of the History of MedicineThis hand drawn illustration rendered in black ink shows two mirror image outlines of cross sections of the cerebral cortex comprised of segmented lines each of which is labeled with the part of the body to which that part of the brain corresponds. Curving around
The social life of PrEP in Kenya
This article is part of the series: A 'Critically Applied' Approach to PrEP
I have perhaps an unpopular position to declare: Although pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is an enormous biomedical breakthrough in the prevention of HIV, it also symbolizes much of what is wrong in current global health practice.
Since 2013, I have been working on HIV prevention research in Kenya, which, as pointed out in this series introduction, has the second highest …
(Dis)continuities in cancer care: An ethnographic approximation to practices of disease stratification
Background:
Disease stratification practices have long been used as a means to produce and make sense of cancer, distinguishing ‘types’, tumour development stages, and even patients’ sociodemographic profiles. However, interest in stratification; that is, the process of dividing oncology populations into clinically meaningful subtypes, has been re-invigorated by two recent developments in medicine and healthcare. First, an increased awareness of …
How do you do interdisciplinarity?
The AusSTS Interdisciplinary workshop took place at Deakin University, in Melbourne, Australia from the 3rd to the 5th of July 2019.
The workshop quite literally started with a confession of the feeling of insecurity that surfaces when you step into an interdisciplinary setting. Cordelia Fine, opening Keynote of the 3-day workshop, began her lecture ‘50 Shades of Grey …