Medical anthropologists often strive to disrupt typical public health and medical discourses, in part by questioning the broader applicability of individualized psychological concepts and biomedical diagnoses outside of the small, privileged Western circles from which these constructs originate (Henrich et al. 2010). However, within our own discipline, access to theoretical innovations and conversations remain decidedly siloed and one-sided. Scholars have …
Tag Archives: Research ethics
Web Round Up: Clinical Trials on Trial
This month saw breaking news web-wide on one aspect of medicine that has drawn critiques and support from both social scientists and biomedical experts: clinical trials. Drug trials overseen by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (see clinicaltrials.gov) and often executed by research universities and hospitals rarely if ever include major segments of the United States population. …
Ethics, Epistemology, and Engagement: Encountering Values in Medical Anthropology — A special issue of Medical Anthropology
The first issue of Medical Anthropology in 2015 is a special issue, entitled “Ethics, Epistemology, and Engagement: Encountering Values in Medical Anthropology.” In their eponymous introduction to the issue, Hansjörg Dilger, Susann Huschke, and Dominik Mattes write:
…The contributions of this special issue discuss moments of uncertainty and friction that researchers experience regarding the ethicality of their research.
Sharing “impediments and catalysts”: notes on the MAYS meeting in Tarragona, June 10-11 2013
From June 10th to June 14th, the Catalan city of Tarragona, Spain, saw its population rise by about 500, as medical anthropologists from over 51 countries arrived for two associated conferences, the Medical Anthropology Young Scholars (MAYS) Annual Meeting and the Joint International EASA-SMA Medical Anthropology Conference. While the EASA-SMA conference certainly took the central stage, the MAYS Annual …
On collaborating with journalists
Last spring I found myself in rural Alabama, sitting between an investigative journalist and a candid salesman I’ll call Sid, who was hawking used and potentially contaminated former FEMA trailers to those displaced by a series of tornados. These trailers had originally been issued by the federal government after Hurricane Katrina and were found to contain elevated levels of formaldehyde…
On Concept Work
The most recent edition of Cultural Anthropology is dedicated to Writing Culture as an episode in the history of anthropological thought. George Marcus (2012) provides one of two vistas of the relation of Writing Culture to experiments and experiences in anthropology today.
He writes in his abstract, “Fieldwork today requires a kind of collaborative concept work that …