AAA Webinar Wednesday Returns with Lenore Manderson September 2nd at 2 PM Eastern

Medical Anthropology in the 21st Century with Lenore Manderson

The AAA’s Webinar Wednesday is back for the Fall Semester. Medical anthropology has expanded in its fields of study and the number of people who identify as medical anthropologists. Yet it is hard to describe what we do: studying people’s experience of sickness and heath, care seeking and care, seems banal and inaccurate. Medical anthropology helps make sense of suffering and recovery as a social experience; it carries us into refugee camps, birthing centers, factories, boardrooms, gaols, rehabilitation centers and schools, across countries and between communities. Many medical anthropologists are employed outside of academic settings: in government ministries and departments of health and other government departments, aid agencies, international and local NGOs, multilateral agencies, health care organizations, and private foundations. Others of us collaborate with such organizations for short-term periods.
In this webinar, I will discuss four areas of medical anthropological research, practice, and application: Changing Childhoods, Chronicity, Health and Illness; Climate Change; and War and Violence.  I will draw on work associated with my current work on a handbook (The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology) I am writing with Elizabeth Cartwright (Idaho State University) and Anita Hardon (University of Amsterdam), out April 2016. By the end of this webinar, you should be familiar with:

• Some of the fields in which medical anthropologists work in communities, clinics and laboratories, on a diverse range of health and social issues,
• How medical anthropology has been applied in practical ways to improve public health
• The employment opportunities available to medical anthropologists.

Lenore Manderson is internationally known for her work in anthropology, social history and public health. She has played a lead role in training and research in inequality, social exclusion and marginality, the social determinants of infectious and chronic disease, gender and sexuality, immigration, ethnicity and inequality, in Australia, Southeast and East Asia (including Malaysia, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan), South Africa and Ghana, and most recently in the Solomon Islands. Much of her work with Indigenous and immigrants Australians, and in infectious disease, is applied; this includes the development of guidelines for practice to enhance access to services and to provide cultural appropriate services. At the University of the Witwatersrand, she is developing a program of work around medical interventions, technology, access and equity. At Brown University, her work includes a five-year program bringing together the natural and social sciences, humanities and the arts in conversations on environmental change and sustainability. She also teaches in the IE Brown Executive MBA.