September 24–25, 2014
Negotiating Structural Vulnerability in Cancer Control: Contemporary Challenges for Applied Anthropology
Co-chaired by Julie Armin, Doctoral Candidate/Research Coordinator, Anthropology and Family & Community Medicine, University of Arizona; Nancy Burke, Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, UC – San Francisco; and Laura Eichelberger, Cancer Prevention Fellow, Nutritional Epidemiological Branch, National Cancer Institute
This seminar focused on cancer control research among structurally vulnerable populations, shifting the analytic focus from the individual to the individual in her social, economic, and cultural contexts to offer insight into such “bottom line†concerns as lowering the cost of care and improving health outcomes, while also addressing, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of social inequality.
October 7–9, 2014
Questioning the “Global” in Global Psychiatry
Co-chaired by Elizabeth Davis, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University and Li Zhang, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis
This seminar worked to develop a complex and ethnographically grounded counter-narrative to that of the seemingly self-evident ascent of neurobiological psychiatry. Using analyses of the ways in which global psychiatry is responding to an expanding gap between clinical care and experimental laboratory research, and through the exploration of psychiatric conceptualizations of culture and its role in the genesis, expression, and treatment of mental illness, seminar participants focused on probing differences within global psychiatry.