Past Events
Some of our events have been video-recorded; those event titles are blue hyperlinks below. To see the complete list, visit our video page.
SPRING 2018
Wednesday, January 24 | 6:30-8:30pm
Panel Discussion with Vincanne Adams, Professor in the Joint UCSF/UC Berkeley Program in Medical Anthropology; Cathy Kennedy, Registered Nurse and a Vice President of National Nurses United, and Javier Arbona, Professor of American Studies and Design at UC Davis.
The ongoing catastrophe following Hurricane Maria’s landfall on Puerto Rico in September has provided a stark reminder that disasters are never merely natural. As with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, historical inequalities have played a clear role in shaping the government’s response. The enduring colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico and the market-driven nature of governmental relief efforts are both critical to understanding the current crisis.
Sponsored by The California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU) and the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, UC Berkeley
Gifford Room (Kroeber Hall 221) Free and open to the public. RSVP here.
Tuesday, February 13 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm
No Ban, No Wall: Confronting the Militarization of Our Borders and Communities
Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)
Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas, Assistant Professor of Department of Chicana/o Studies at UC Davis
Pierre Labossiere, Co-Founder of the Haiti Action Committee
Abraham Vela M.D., Volunteer, Clínica Martín-Baró
with Seth Holmes, Co-Chair of ISSI’s Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and Medical Anthropology as respondent
The Trump presidency has increased attacks on immigrant and marginalized communities through targeting sanctuary cities, instituting the Muslim ban, and revoking temporary protected status for thousands. But, these actions are based on a long-standing foundation of xenophobia and criminalization. Such repression manifests not only at borders, but also in our backyards in the form of militarized policing, state surveillance, and collusion between local and federal law enforcement. Please join us for a panel discussion to analyze these intersections with some of the individuals working to defend the health and rights of immigrant communities.
Sponsored by California Nurses Association & Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, UC Berkeley
Gifford Room (Kroeber Hall 221)
March 22, 2018 | 6 - 8 p.m.
Beyond Identity: Building Collective Struggles for Racial and Health Justice
George Lipsitz
Lecture by George Lipsitz, Professor of Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, Rupa Marya, Associate Professor of Medicine and Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition at UC San Francisco, and Carlos Martinez, PhD student in the UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Joint Program in Medical Anthropology.
Room 221, Kroeber Hall
April 18, 2018 | 6 - 8 p.m.
Latin American Social Medicine, Then and Now
Jaime Breilh, Rector of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador
Dorothy Porter, Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine, UC San Francisco
Clara Mantini-Briggs, Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Fernando Losada, NNU and Global Nurses United
Luther Castillo, Founder, First Popular Garifuna Hospital in Honduras
Seth Holmes, Associate Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and of Medical Anthropology, as Moderator
2251 College Avenue, Room 101, Archaeological Research Facility
April 19, 2018 | 6 - 8 p.m.p
Toward Health and Environmental Liberation: Insights from Latin American Critical Epidemiology
Lecture by Jaime Breilh, Rector of the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador
with Amani Nuru-Jeter, Associate Professor, Public Health, as respondent
and Charles Briggs, Professor, Department of Anthropology, as moderator
Sponsored by The California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU) and the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, UC Berkeley
Gifford Room, Kroeber Hall
FALL 2017
Thursday, September 7 | 6:30-8:30pm and Friday, September 8 | 8:30am-5:30pm
UC Berkeley Program for the Medical Humanities presents:
Medicine and Violence
Join an interdisciplinary gathering of medical professionals and humanities and legal scholars to explore the various ways in which health care and violence interrelate.
Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley. For room numbers, complete program, and free registration link, please visit the website.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Tuesday, October 24 I 4:00-5:30pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine presents:
Ways of Knowing the Ordinary in Climate Adaptation
Sarah Vaughn, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
I track the development of a Red Cross participatory climate adaptation project in a flood-prone and former urban squatter-town in Guyana in this talk. Based on fieldwork between 2009 and 2010, the talk focuses on one technology specific to Red Cross urban climate adaptation called the Vulnerability Capacity Assessment (VCA). The goal of the talk is to examine the VCA as a provocation for the ethnography of climate change. Specifically, I ask: how should we understand the work of participatory climate adaptation, which seeks to train people not to avoid but become sensitive to the ordinariness of vulnerability? I answer this question by engaging recent debates on new materialism in the social studies of science and affect theory to consider how knowledge about vulnerability is understood as an ‘ordinary’ dimension of everyday encounters with climate change.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley and Joint UCSF/UCB PhD Program in Medical Anthropology
Wednesday, November 8 I 4:00-5:30pm
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues presents:
Chronic Cultural Impossibility: Ideologies that Undermine Health as a Fundamental Social Right
Clara Mantini-Briggs, Departments of Anthropology and Demography, UC Berkeley
Even when health professionals embrace conceptions of health as a fundamental social right, health practitioners can embrace a framework that, in critical race scholar Denise Silva's terms, “produces and regulates human condition and establishes (morally and intellectually) a distinct kind of human being.” How can a professional commitment to prioritize the health of low-income racialized minority populations go hand-in-hand with efforts to justify the denial of effective and comprehensive health services? Wakahara de la Orqueta lies in the Delta Amacuro rainforest of eastern Venezuela, where indigenous Warao communities were affected by a cholera epidemic that started in August of 1992. Working there as a physician during the epidemic, I saw residents use their own hands, knowledge, and belief in new and better futures to face a preventable and treatable bacterial infection that can nonetheless kill in as little as eight hours, only to have health professionals literally crush their creative efforts. What was their logic? Paul Farmer has referred to appropriations of anthropological explanation by health professionals as "immodest claims of causality." Here I look more closely at such invocations of cultural reasoning by exploring how they emerge from what I refer to as an eternal recurrence of the syndrome of "chronic cultural impossibility."
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, UC Berkeley
Spring 2017
Thursday - Friday, February 9-10
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine presents:
Circulating Health: Mediatization and the (Im)Mobilization of Medical Subjects and Objects
This interdisciplinary, international conference features scholars from Belgium, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the UK, and the USA. The conference explores intersections between health and media, including how health news shapes conceptions of the body, life, death, race, health, disease, and health care and ideas about what constitutes knowledge about health, who has it, who needs it, and what sorts of rights and obligations it engenders.
To read more information regrding this conference, click here.
Location: Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by: Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Institute of International Studies
Co-sponsored by: Department of Anthropology, Graduate School of Journalism, Townsend Center for the Humanities, and School of Public Health, Berkeley Media Studies Group of the Public Health Institute, and the Folklore Graduate Program
Tuesday, February 14 I 3:30-5:00pm
Center for Ethnographic Research Colloquia Series:
Ambivalent Kinship and the Production of Wellbeing: the Social Dynamics of Health Among Women in Indian Slums
Claire Snell-Rood, Assistant Professor, Health and Social Behavior, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley
Contemporary advocates for health have endorsed widespread change through attention to the social conditions of health. Yet the large scale and policy orientation of this approach are unconcerned with how women negotiate their social relationships every day. Guided by new anthropological approaches to kinship, I examine women's relationships with family, community, state, and the environment through ethnography in a North Indian slum. While relationships were necessary channels to obtain the stuff of survival, women remarked on their hidden consequences. Haphazardly played, relationships yielded disastrous effects on social reputation, piled on long-term obligation, and whittled away one’s self-respect. Women could be left with no one to depend on and no moral reserve to sustain themselves. What was in their hands, they explained, were the boundaries they drew within relationships to maintain their independence and their capacity to define their meaning. This ethnographic approach re-appraises the social scientific and health literature on patron-client relationships, social support, and family exchange, while introducing a new social lens to approach wellness.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Gender & Women's Studies, and Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley
Monday, March 13 I 4:00-5:00pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Structural Competency Event Series:
Fighting for Health Equity in 2017 and Beyond
Congresswoman Barbara Lee
with welcoming remarks by Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley
Affordable, accessible, high-quality healthcare is a fundamental human right. Congresswoman Lee served as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus during the drafting of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and worked to ensure strong provisions that expand health care access, address health disparities and create incentives for people to live healthy lives. As a psychiatric social worker, Congresswoman Lee is dedicated to ensuring everyone has access to affordable and high-quality healthcare, especially the most vulnerable. Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s main healthcare focus is always on health disparities and health equity, especially for racial and ethnic minorities. Congresswoman Lee is strongly opposed to any efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and will continue to fight to ensure that we all have access to affordable, quality healthcare.
Chan Shun Auditorium, 2050 Valley Life Sciences Building. Enter from the east side (towards the Campanile).
Co-sponsored by the Schools of Public Health and Social Welfare, UC Berkeley, and Samuel Merritt University
Tuesday, March 14 I 4:30-6:00pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Structural Competency Event Series:
Violence, Stigma, and Health Disparities of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth
A symposium featuring Paul Sterzing (UC Berkeley), Dorothy Espelage (University of Florida) and Mark Hatzenbeuhler (Columbia University).
150 University Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
Sponsored by: The Center for Child and Youth Policy, School of Social Welfare, School of Public Health, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Institute of Human Development
Contact ccyp@berkeley.edu with any questions
Wednesday, March 22 I CANCELLED
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues Colloquia Series:
Chronic Cultural Impossibility: Ideologies that Undermine Health as a Fundamental Social Right
Clara Mantini-Briggs, Departments of Anthropology and Demography, UC Berkeley
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Tuesday, April 4 I 4:00-5:30pm
Berkeley Center for Social Medicine Colloquia Series:
What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City
Elizabeth Roberts, Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Michigan
Entanglement is a key concept in contemporary science and technology studies (STS). By tracing all the contingent and uncertain relations that endow objects with seemingly stable boundaries, entanglement allows us to see how such boundaries restrict our ability to know the world better. This talk deploys the concept of entanglement in an examination of contemporary life in a working-class Mexico City neighborhood, Colonia Periferico, and a longitudinal environmental health project that studies the neighborhood’s residents. While entanglement is useful for analyzing the study (e.g., for reconnecting variables that the scientists have isolated), my examination of the entanglement of working-class bodies with NAFTA and the ongoing War on Drugs shows that the concept has its limits. For working-class residents of Mexico City life is already deeply entangled with chronic economic and political instability shaped through the violent ravages of transnational capital. To explore the utility and limits of entanglement I trace how residents in Col. Periferico seek stability by making boundaries to keep out the disruptive effects of police and public health surveillance. Col. Periferico’s toxic boundaries, which include a sewage-filled dam, cement dust, and freeway exhaust, are clearly entangled with residents’ health. They get inside. These entanglements are the price paid for a remarkable stability within Col. Periferico’s boundaries, where children can play on the streets and attentive care for drug-addicted and disabled residents is part of everyday life. Additionally, residents would like to share in the privilege of inhabiting a world where objects can be experienced separate from the relations that make them; a world with reliable drinking water and accurate blood lead measurements. With the goal of knowing the world better, then, STS might complicate celebratory calls for the uncertainty of entanglement by taking into account both the practices that make boundaries, and what boundaries have to offer.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
May 1 - 2
Anthropology on the Frontlines: Honoring the Work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Monday May 1, 1:00-7:00pm
Tuesday May 2, 11:00am-8:00pm
For program, locations, and free registration, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anthropology-on-the-frontlines-honoring-the-work-of-nancy-scheper-hughes-tickets-32367307488
The complete program is available here.
For any questions, please contact: fete@berkeley.edu
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Fall 2016
Wednesday, October 26 | 12:00 - 1:30pm
Birth Matters: Black Women and Research Justice as Transformative Praxis
Julia Chinyere Oparah, Associate Provost and Professor and Co-Chair of Ethnic Studies, Mills College
Research justice is a strategic framework within which those directly affected by structural violence and discrimination use research tools in order to achieve self determination and lasting social change. Based on a term coined by DataCenter, an Oakland-based research collective, this movement toward community-driven research demands that academic researchers interrogate questions of power, privilege and accountability in our research praxis. Using a research justice approach, Oparah worked alongside members of Black Women Birthing Justice to document black women's experiences of childbirth, and to publish an anthology of critical essays and testimonies on black bodies and birth justice. Their research uncovered birthing as a site of disabling, trauma or even death for black women and gender non-conforming people. In this talk, Oparah explores her experience as an activist scholar in the movement to #LiberateBlackBirth and shares both the transformative power and the dilemmas of research justice.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Co-sponsored by Center for Race & Gender Social Movements Working Group and Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Friday, November 4 | 12:00 - 6:00pm
Structural Competency Series
Structural Competency: New Responses to Inequity and Discrimination in Health and Welfare
Structural competency is a new framework for understanding and addressing the inequalities that make us sick. This framework analyzes institutional and structural hierarchies and discrimination in order to respond to the ways these lead to sickness and disease. This conference, the first focused on public health and structural competency, will bring together national and local experts and community organizations to imagine paths towards a more equal and healthy future.
Keynote: Helena Hansen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology, New York University. “Structural Competency for Public Health.”
For a complete program, location, and registration, please visit the conference website.
Wednesday, November 9 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
ISSI Colloquia Series:
The Emotional Lives of Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS
Samuel Cohn, Professor, Medieval History, University of Glasgow, UK
From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blamed the ‘other’, and victimized the victims of epidemic diseases. Such hate and violence, moreover, more readily erupted when diseases were mysterious without known cures or preventive measures. The evidence for these proclamations, however, rests on a handful of examples--the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the U.S. experience. From investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics reaching back to one during Pharaoh Mempses’s First Dynasty (c. 2920 BCE) to the distrust and violence that erupted with Ebola in 2014-15, I argue that the trajectory and essence of epidemics' socio-psychological consequences across time differ radically from present notions. First, historians post-AIDS have missed a fundamental ingredient of the history of Epidemics. Instead of sparking hate and blame across time, epidemics have shown a remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion and to spur self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, instead of spurring hate and violence when diseases were mysterious, that is, almost without exception before the ‘Laboratory Revolution’ of the late nineteenth century, modernity was the great incubator of a disease-hate nexus. Third, even with those diseases that have provoked hate as with smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing diseased victims was rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences is more varied and richer than historians and pundits have heretofore allowed.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Spring 2016
Tuesday, March 1 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
ISSI Colloquia Series:
Unintended Pregnancy Prevention: Public Health Imperative, Clinical Outcome, or Reproductive Justice?
Anu Gomez, Assistant Professor, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley
Unintended pregnancy is considered a social problem in the United States, frequently described as burdensome, costly, staggering, and/or devastating. For decades, researchers have called for the improvement of measures of unintended pregnancy, as standard survey measures fail to capture the complex constellation of factors that impact whether a woman describes her pregnancy as intended or unintended. Despite its poor measurement, the concept of unintended pregnancy continues to drive public health imperatives and clinical practices. In the present study, we analyze in-depth individual interview and survey data from approximately 50 couples including young (ages 18-24) women and their male partners to examine pregnancy intentions. We find great variations in how participants’ with access to educational and economic opportunities describe their pregnancy intentions, desires and motivations compared to those that are more disadvantaged. In particular, we have focused on the idea of ambivalent intentions. These data suggest that individuals who appear ambivalent by traditional survey measures are usually not ambivalent at all; rather, their survey responses reflect a superficial mechanism for self-protection or a way to give voice to far more complex internal processes. Given the opportunity for deeper reflection and analysis, most participants were clear about their pregnancy intentions and described competing individual, relational and structural factors that impact their ability to plan and envision families. We argue that current conceptualizations of unintended pregnancy promote heteronormativity and locate the cause of social problems in reproduction, leading to policies and interventions that can paradoxically undermine reproductive justice.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Monday, March 7 | 5:00 - 7:00pm
"Envisioning Radical Collective Medicine."
Prof. Adrienne Pine (American University) and Prof. Helena Hansen (NYU).
Professor Pine will present clips from Beth Geglia and Jesse Freeston's film Revolutionary Medicine and discuss the film's social life as an organizing tool toward a vision and practice of healthcare as a human right, drawing on examples from Honduras, Cuba and the United States.
Professor Hansen will screen footage from Managing the Fix, her film about the art and exclusions of treating addiction in the age of pills. Following three heroin dependent people through their attempts at treatment, the film illustrates how a two-tiered system developed that excludes many. For those access addiction pharmaceuticals, it asks whether medication is enough, and whether the goal of treatment should be to reduce harm or become "drug free."
New Location:
Berkeley Free Clinic - the Fireside Room
2339 Durant Ave., Berkeley
This event is sponsored by the Critical Social Medicine Working Group (RadMed), a project of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Thursday, April 7 | 12:00 - 1:30pm
Chasing the Dragon: The Malleable Addict and Shaming in a Chinese Therapeutic Community
Sandra Teresa Hyde, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, McGill University, and Visiting Scholar, ISSI
Until the late 1990s, convicted Chinese illegal drug users were considered criminals and placed in either the justice system’s drug prisons or in labor camps. Today, while the drug prison and the labor camp still exist, a small group of psychiatrists and AIDS activists who want to embrace what Foucault labeled the humanism of the asylum provides clinical residential care at "Sunlight." As such there are two competing ideologies on controlling drug epidemics in China: the dominant one is punitive and the other therapeutic; however, within these two ideological positions, there remains a massive disjuncture between the reality of everyday life and official policy. In this paper I focus on the intersection of subjectivity and the social-psychological dimensions of individual and collective lives in the onslaught of globalization and illegal drug consumption. I ask: 1) how do Chinese users of illegal street drugs learn to reform their emotions in an effort to rethink the modern Chinese healthy citizen? And 2) how does one write a clinical ethnography of the emotions in a therapeutic community in contemporary China? Sunlight is a clinical space that rises and falls within a particular set of institutions and ideas that travel across the globe -- behavior modification, AA/Narcotics Anonymous, Mind/Body treatments, abstinence -- what do these modalities say about how ‘a complicated kindness’ travels? I end by problematizing the conditions and practices within Sunlight therapeutic community, where we find new kinds of post-millennial citizens performing therapeutic rituals that lead to a complicated kind of care and healing.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies
Fall 2015
Thursday, September 17 | 12:00 - 1:30pm
BCSM Co-sponsored Event:
Wheelchair Politics: Disability and Violent Masculinities within a Gang
Laurence Ralph, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African American Studies, Harvard University
My paper argues that, while admirable, the focus on assuaging social difference within the disability right’s movement has served to obscure key distinctions within disabled communities along the axes of race, socioeconomic status, and gender. While the larger community of disabled activists tends to use the social model of disability, in which there is multiple ways to view ability and physical capacities are not devalued, disabled ex-gang members rely on a medical model of disability that highlights physical differences rather than diminishing them. Here we see what happens when several wheelchair-bound ex-gang members use their life stories to try and steer other young gang members away from a gang’s reliance on sacrifice and vengeance. The fact that they are willing to insist on the defectiveness of their own bodies as a way to deter gun violence is an example of the sheer magnitude of problems with which poor African Americans must contend, and the sheer burden that violence creates in urban Chicago.
Gifford Room, 221 Kroeber Hall
Sponsored by Center for Ethnographic Research and Department of Anthropology
Tuesday, October 20 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
BCSM Co-sponsored Event:
Biotechnologies and Immigration: Biological Citizenship and the Use of DNA Testing for Family Reunification
Torsten Heinemann, Professor of Sociology, Institute of Sociology, Universität Hamburg
Since the 1990s, many countries around the world have begun to use DNA analysis to establish biological relatedness in family reunification cases. Family reunification refers to the right of family members living abroad to join relatives who hold long-term residence permits in a given country. While this right has been an integral part of many countries’ immigration policies, the current trend among host countries seems to favor more restrictive family reunification policies. To be reunited, family members have to prove their family status by official documents. Even if applicants possess the required documents, immigration authorities often reject the information as they question the authenticity of the documents. In this context, many countries resort to DNA tests to resolve cases in which they consider the information presented on family relations to be incomplete or unsatisfactory. Today, at least 21 nation states have incorporated the use of DNA testing into decision-making on immigration.
In this talk, I will present the results of an international research project on the use of DNA testing for family reunification in Europe and will compare them with the situation in the USA. I outline general trends of DNA analysis for family reunification and analyze the societal and political implications of parental testing in this context. I argue that DNA analyses for family reunification establish and strengthen a biological family model which is in contrast to the more pluralistic and social concepts of family in many societies in Europe and North America. I will then relate my findings to the ongoing debate on biological citizenship and show that biological criteria play an important role in decision-making on citizenship rights in nation-states. I argue that the use of parental testing for immigration endorses a biological concept of the family that is mobilized to diminish citizenship rights.
The argument is based on an extensive document analysis as well as interviews with representatives of international governmental organizations, international and national NGOs and immigration authorities, lawyers specializing in immigration law, geneticists and those applying for family reunification.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Friday, October 23 | 12:00 - 1:30pm
BCSM Brown Bag Colloquium:
Theory in Action: Violence in the Margins
Javier Auyero, Professor of Latin American Sociology, University of Texas, Austin
Philippe Bourgois, Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley
James Quesada, Professor of Anthropology, San Francisco State University, as moderator and discussant
Violence at the Urban Margins (Oxford University Press, 2015) brings together scholars across disciplines working on a perplexing question. How did Latin America emerge from decades of extreme violence — revolutionary, counter-insurgency, and military state — at the end of the 20th century only to plunge into a cauldron of delinquent, criminal, interpersonal, and political state/para-state violence under democratic regimes? Violence in the inner-cities of North America is another matter, though linked through the drug trade and forced migrations, as well as to US militancy and wars abroad that have come home to roost. Our purpose is to ignite a North-South hemispheric dialogue and debate on “theory in action” — the creative uses of diverse theoretical, analytical and ethnographic/methodological tools applied to the study of the networks of trans-national, state, paramilitary, criminal, global and local perpetrators, collaborators, victims, and bystanders of urban terror in the Americas.
New location: 170 Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley-UCSF Critical Social Medicine Working Group, Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, and Center for Latin American Studies
Thursday, October 27 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
BCSM Co-sponsored Event:
The Molecular Reinscription of Race in Science, Law, and Medicine
Troy Duster, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley
In the first decade after the completion of the Human Genome Project, there has been a world-wide development that few predicted – the resurgence of the idea that racial taxonomies which have been deployed to explain complex social behaviors (such as crime, academic performance, and massive health disparities) have a biological and genetic basis. This presentation will attempt to briefly chronicle, analyze, and attempt to account for this development – and address some of the important implications for the social sciences.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Sponsored by Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Wednesday, November 4 | 12:00 - 1:30pm
BCSM Co-sponsored Event:
Tuskegee Then and Now: An Exploration of Historical Trauma in the Life of a Direct Descendant
Tina Sacks, Assistant Professor, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley
The specter of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study looms large in the research literature, particularly related to African-American’s distrust of medical research. Less is known about how direct descendants of study victims perceive health care institutions and providers. The purpose of this study is to explore the long-term implications of the Tuskegee Study on a woman whose great-grandfather died of untreated syphilis as a result. The study explores the 1) role of historical trauma on Black populations; 2) inter-generational impact of trauma in a Black family; and 3) implications of these events on engagement with healthcare providers. This study used the case study method to explore the experience of one woman who is a direct descendant. The respondent, a 37-year old married woman with children, was recruited as part of a larger study on healthcare disparities among the Black middle class. Data are based on a focus group and a 2-hour in-depth interview. The Tuskegee Study continues to affect the behavior of direct descendants. Members of the respondent’s family strictly prohibited her from seeking medical care from any non-Black healthcare provider. As an adult, the respondent refused to allow her children to be treated by a non-Black healthcare provider. The respondent and her family developed these strategies to counteract the particular trauma of Tuskegee and the general trauma of being treated negatively in majority White institutions. This study provides historically situated insights into how Black people interpret racial discrimination, and strategies they use to counteract it, including seeking race-concordant healthcare providers.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Sponsored by Center for Research on Social Change
Spring 2015
Saturday, January 3 | 3:00 - 4:30pm
“All I Eat is ARVs” and “All They Do Is Pray”: The Narrowing of Care in Mozambique’s AIDS Economy
Ippolytos Kalofonos MD, PhD, University of California Los Angeles, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Tuesday, February 10 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Is Housing a Structural Intervention for Health in Homeless Youth?
Colette Auerswald MD, MS, Associate Professor of Community Health and Human Development, UC Berkeley School of Public Health; Director of Research Training, Joint Medical Program
Transitional aged homeless youth (TAHY,18-24) suffer health disparities, largely related to drug and sexual risk behaviors. Research indicates that providing permanent supportive housing (PSH) to homeless adults reduces their drug and sexual risk behaviors. However, the effects of PSH on the health behaviors of TAHY have not been studied. Research further suggests that changes in the social networks of homeless youth may reduce such risk behaviors. PSH may therefore have an impact on survival behaviors, social networks, HIV risk, and substance abuse. In January of 2014, the first San Francisco city-funded PSH building exclusively designated TAHY opened its doors. We are conducting an ongoing mixed ethnographic and epidemiological assessment of the effect of PSH on TAHY’s health and health behaviors.
Anna Head Alumnae Hall, 2537 Haste Street
Sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues; co-sponsored by BCSM
Wednesday, April 1 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
CRSC Colloquia Series:
Ecologies of Dissent: Neighborhood Health and the Art of Relational Politics
Michael Montoya, Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and Anthropology, UC Irvine
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine
Fall 2014
Tuesday, September 30 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Political Therapeutics in Italy
Cristiana Giordano, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UC Davis
In this paper, I discuss the experience of Italian clinical ethno-psychiatry as an emerging technique that provides culturally appropriate therapeutic services exclusively to foreigners, political refugees, and victims of torture and trafficking. This clinical practice has a political impact on other Italian institutions (such as the Catholic Church, the police, and social services) involved in aid programs for foreigners that increasingly turn to ethno-psychiatrists to consult on how to shape culturally and psychologically appropriate interventions for foreigners. The specificity of Italian ethno-psychiatry, though, can only be understood against the backdrop of the debates around the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill and the radical critique of public institutions initiated by Franco Basaglia and the de-institutionalization movement in the early 1970s. Crucial to the Italian context is also the work of Antonio Gramsci and his reflections on the relationships between hegemony and subaltern cultures, in addition to the role of the organic intellectual in creating a field of political action that could involve subalterns in defining what counts as politics. Through an ethnography of clinical cases and interactions between ethno-psychiatrists and local communities, I show how these legacies intersect in the practice of Italian ethno-psychiatry in ways that are broadly relevant not only for the politics of alterity within clinical settings, but also for critiquing psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion. This clinical practice allows for a re-thinking of the political and phenomenological grounds of existence, while also offering a critical frame to issues of "global mental health."
Anna Head Alumnae Hall, 2537 Haste Street
Sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues; co-sponsored by BCSM
Tuesday, October 28 | 4:00 - 5:30
Protestant Techniques of Caring for the Self
Ian Whitmarsh, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, UCSF School of Medicine
In Trinidad, as in other countries, the state increasingly works with Protestant churches to disseminate biomedical techniques of maintaining health, conducting blood tests and teaching proper diet and body size. I draw on recent rethinking of "the secular" to argue that ties between Presbyterianism and biomedical practices in Trinidad reveal a Protestantism latent in international techniques of care for the chronic disease subject. Protestant endeavors have long focused on, the "involuntary poor" as a figure unable to enact proper choice, suggesting not a contradiction but rather a deep kinship between the liberal individual and the subject founded in economic, social, political structures. As international medical techniques implicitly carry out a Protestant care for the involuntary poor, new tensions are produced with traditions such as Hinduism and obeah that run counter to Christian logics.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues; co-sponsored by BCSM
Thursday, November 6 | 12:00 - 1:30pm
Homosexual Mutants! Biases in the Neurobiological Study of Sexual Orientation
Erik Eckhert, MD/MS Student, UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program
Lawrence Cohen, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, as respondent
This work examines the space between biology and biological discourse by reflecting on the reemergence of antiquated sexological discourses in the contemporary basic science literature behind sex and sexual orientation, and attempts to disentangle the socio-scientific conditions that enable their persistence. It employs modified grounded theory to explore published works on the fruitless (fru) gene in Drosophila neurobiology, which is notable for being implicated in determining sex and sexual orientation in the flies and is the clearest example to date of a genetically programed biochemical signaling cascade controlling a specific set of (courtship) behaviors. With an emphasis on experimental design, data inclusion, and the interpretation of results, my analysis follows three interrelated thematic clusters: “Homosexual Mutants” problematizes claims about the fru male’s sexual orientation by calling into question the “heterosexuality” of wildtype males, the assumptions behind behavioral assays used to determine sexual orientation, and the tenets of Sexual Selection used to discursively disable or inferiorize queer organisms. “Sexing the Body” examines the techniques used to assign sex on sub-organismal scales, considers the effect this has on reifying the groundedness of sex as a biological concept, and traces the practice and effects of reducing sex to a male/female dichotomy in the fru field. “Making the Model Work– Disabling, Inverting, Passivizing” refuses and confuses the fru field’s ‘homosexual by broken sex detector model’ by looking at what’s really being detected by male flies and considering the interplay between discourses about sexuality and disability, sexual inversion and femininity.
Room C108, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program and the Center for Science Technology Medicine and Society
Thursday, November 13 | 12:00 - 1:00pm
Children at the Border, Children at the Margins: Health, Responsibility, and Immigration
Video of this event is available here.
Stefano M. Bertozzi, Dean and Professor of Health Policy & Management, Public Health, UC Berkeley
Lariza Dugan-Cuadra, Executive Director, CARECEN Central American Resource Center
Seth Holmes, Assistant Professor, Public Health and Medical Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Rubén Martínez, Journalist and Author of Desert America, Crossing Over, and The New Americans
Casey Peek, Producer of “New World Border”
Adrienne Pine, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, American University
Patricia Baquedano-López, Chair, Center for Latino Policy Research, and Associate Professor, Education, UC Berkeley, as moderator
While unaccompanied migrant children have been at the center of a media firestorm, journalists and politicians generally ignore the context, experiences, and health of these children. The children are portrayed as criminals or as victims of drug lords and gang members; both representations minimize the effects of historical and contemporary United States policies and interventions in Latin America. This panel discussion includes scholars and organizers who provide nuanced perspectives on the crisis, challenging the logics of detention and deportation. The panelists bring together anthropological, historical, public health, and policy analyses to put the health, well-being, and rights of migrant children at the center.
245 Li Ka Shing Center, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. Co-sponsored by Center for Latino Policy Research, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and School of Public Health
Spring 2014
Tuesday, March 11 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Inconceivable: Where IVF Goes Bad
S. Lochlann Jain, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
Nearly half of all Americans will be diagnosed with an invasive cancer—an all-too ordinary aspect of daily life. Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the search for a cure. Amidst furious debates over its causes and treatments, scientists generate reams of data—information that ultimately obscures as much as it clarifies. Award-winning anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain deftly unscrambles the high stakes of the resulting confusion. Expertly reading across a range of material that includes history, oncology, law, economics, and literature, Jain explains how a national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from, and cure cancer entraps us in a state of paradox—one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for doctors, patients, caretakers, and policy makers alike. This chronicle, burning with urgency and substance leavened with brio and wit, offers a lucid guide to understanding and navigating the quicksand of uncertainty at the heart of cancer. Malignant vitally shifts the terms of an epic battle we have been losing for decades: the war on cancer.
ISSI Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way,
Co-sponsored by The Program in Medical Anthropology
Tuesday, March 18 | 12:00 - 1:00pm
The Press and the Press Release: Inventing the Crystal Meth-HIV Connection
Cindy Patton, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Cindy Patton is a longtime commentator on social aspects of the AIDS epidemic. An early member of the AIDS Action Committee of Boston and an advisor to community organizations in Vancouver, BC, she has been involved in community organizing around gay men's sexuality, research ethics, and media criticism. She is currently Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University (Canada), where from 2003-2013 she held the Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health.
Abstract: From 1960s medical reports to the Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis trials, Gay men have been persistently described as intransigent to sexual health advice. However, it is not at all clear that there has even been a sustained effort to provide basic sex education for gay men. In the late 1970s, the Carter Administration reversed its policy related to gay health research and training as a result of the Anita Bryant activism, a change of course repeated in 1987, when efforts to promote safe sex among gay men was defunded by the Helms Amendment. This paper is part of a longer project that traces the parallel history of the gay health movement and socio-medical claims about the sources of gay men's risk.
ISSI Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way, Berkeley
Co-sponsored by The Program in Medical Anthropology
Wednesday, March 19 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
Seth Holmes, Martin Sisters Endowed Chair, Assistant Professor of Health and Social Behavior, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley; Faculty Director of the Center for Social Medicine at ISSI
Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), this paper (and new book by the same name) explores how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. The paper examines structural and symbolic violence, medicalization, and the clinical gaze as they affect the experiences and perceptions of a vertical slice of indigenous Mexican migrant farmworkers, farm owners, doctors, and nurses. This work analyzes the ways in which socially structured suffering comes to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care, especially through imputations of ethnic body difference.
ISSI Wildavsky Conference Room, 2538 Channing Way, Berkeley
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Wednesday, April 9 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
From Plants to Pills: Take Bitter Roots for Malaria
Abena Osseo-Asare, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley
How do plants become pharmaceuticals? In this talk, I examine the history of efforts to patent a treatment for malaria made from the bitter roots of fever vine (Cryptolepis sanguinolenta). Malaria is a serious health risk in tropical West Africa. In Ghana, where these bitter roots became known as "Ghana Quinine," a group of African scientists devoted their lives to creating a patented pharmaceutical from the plant. I consider their interactions with traditional healers from the 1940s, their struggles to establish a fledgling pharmaceutical industry, and the conflicts that complicated the success of the new drug in this postcolonial nation. This little known historical case provides a window into recent controversies surrounding biodiversity prospecting in tropical environments, the rights of indigenous peoples to shared benefits, and the quest for pharmaceutical patents. It is drawn from my recently published book, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa.
Wildavsky Conference Room, ISSI, 2538 Channing Way
Co-Sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Fall 2013
Wednesday, November 6 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Metrics of the Global Sovereign: Numbers and Stories in Global Health
Vincanne Adams, Professor, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, UCSF School of Medicine
The recent shift from International Health Development to Global Health Sciences in the now fifty-year-old post-colonial infrastructure of transnational health aid is not a simple substitution of new bottles for old wine. Emergent trends in Global Health reveal more complex transformations in the practices of audit, funding, and intervention in the effort to improve health outcomes on a global scale. One of the most important features of this shift has been the growing reliance on specific kinds of quantitative metrics that make use of evidence-based measures, experimental research platforms, and cost-effectiveness rubrics for even the most intractable problems and most promising interventions. Collectively these trends pose a problem of knowledge in relation to how we understand efficacy but also how we come to terms with the new “global sovereign” – a flexible assemblage of data production, number crunching and profit-sourcing that asks all exercises of intervention to work within its terms and limits. At the same time, ethnography pushes us to see the remainder, or residuals, of these trends that appear as stories of single lives saved, struggles won and relationships emergent. Stories carry an emotional surfeit that might be read as both antidote and engine in the markets of global health today, and this lecture offers preliminary insights about the study of such global health trends.
Anna Head Alumnae Hall, 2537 Haste Street
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Wednesday, October 6 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Neurocratic Futures in the Disability Economy: Pregnancy, Addiction and Mental Illness in the US Welfare State
Kelly Knight, Assistant Professor, Kocaeli University
Drawing on four years of ethnographic research, I will address a collision of politics, science, and social policy with historic roots in 1990s neoliberal welfare reform and current consequences in the everyday lives of addicted pregnant women. In 1997, the disallowance of substance use dependence as a qualifying, disabling health condition for Social Security Income (SSI) benefits spurned the development of a new disability economy. Despite widely accepted scientific evidence demonstrating the high frequency of mental illness and substance use disorder comorbidity, a new social actor, “the neurocrat,” was constructed to document mental health disorders in exception of substance use disorder for SSI applicants. Today, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Bipolar Disorder are diagnosed at very high frequency and the prescription of broad spectrum atypical antipsychotic medications is routine among homeless women. Clinically speaking, PTSD and Bipolar Disorder are difficult conditions to diagnose and treat in the presence of active substance use. Yet the symptoms of these conditions - trauma, despair, rage and mania – are viewed as appropriate responses on the part of pregnant addicts to experiences of structural violence, social suffering, and housing instability. It is also well understood that accessing SSI welfare benefits through successful neurocratic disability claims enables the safety-net health care system while also ensuring access to subsidized housing, case management, and other social benefits. In this way, neurocrats make the madness of poverty socially legible. Neurocratic futures for pregnant addicts are now necessary and entrenched on both institutional and personal levels. They can ensure social recognition and material viability for pregnant addicts, as long as women can agree to be mentally disabled, rather than merely addicted and just poor.
Alumnae Hall, Anna Head Building A, 2537 Haste Street
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Wednesday, September 18 | 4:00 - 5:30pm
Narrative Without Language: Mental Health and the Invisibility of Care in South Africa
Leslie Swartz, Professor of Psychology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
At the heart of much of health care is the assumption, expectation, or hope, that at some level patients and clinicians understand one another, however incompletely. The fact is, however, that in many contexts, clinicians and patients speak different languages and there are no interpreters employed to help bridge the communication gap. South Africa has 11 official languages and is also committed to the development of South African Sign Language. Despite this, patients in many mental health settings have the same (or worse) linguistic access to care as was the case in the apartheid era. I sketch answers to the question of how it can be that this crucial aspect of care access can continue to be overlooked in a democratic country, especially as South Africa has a constitutional commitment to equal access and non-discrimination. There is a legacy of service provision from the apartheid era, and interpreting is currently undertaken by nurses, cleaners, security guards, and family members of patients, amongst others. I suggest that changing understandings of the nature of careers in the health field, international trends in mental health theory and practice towards crude biologism, and ongoing patterns of social exclusion and stigma, all contribute not only to a continuing state of compromised linguistic access to mental health care but also to processes of rendering invisible the actual work of care in the mental health field. In this context, institutions construct stories about patients without being able to speak to them directly. There are also stories constructed about the language access issue. These stories have changed and developed against the backdrop of institutional continuity embedded in dramatically changing political circumstances in South Africa. Preliminary data from a pilot interpreting project suggest that to expose the care issues at stake in informal interpreting is tantamount to shining a light on broader and more pervasive issues of exclusion and inequality in the health care system, and in South Africa as a whole. In this regard, I explore some of the discursive strategies my research group and I have used and are using in developing new initiatives to improve language access for patients.
221 Kroeber Hall Anthropology Department, UC Berkeley
Co-sponsored by the Program in Medical Anthropology and Disability Studies
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-5670
TEL: 510.643.7237
FAX: 510.642.8674
