hope for democracy at the grassroots

Japan Today published commentary from social anthropologist Dame Henrietta Moore, director of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London where she also holds the Chair in Culture, Philosophy and Design. Noting the seeming political disarray in several major democratic countries, she writes: “Yet all around the world, there are growing grassroots movements challenging this status quo. Recognizing the shortcomings of the political and economic systems around them, people are seizing the opportunity to effect change for themselves and their communities.”

gay sex conviction in Korean military decried

The Korea Herald reported on the response from Americans living in the Republic of Korea to the recent conviction by the Korean military of a gay soldier for having consensual sex. The article includes comments from Timothy Gitzen, an activist for Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights for Korea and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Minnesota: “…it’s state-sanctioned violence against its own people…It is the same argument people would use in the US to talk about segregation in the military between people of color and white soldiers…”

Sanders, Corbyn, and honesty

CNN reported about Bernie Sanders’ visit to the University of Cambridge and included comments about similarities between Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The article quoted social anthropologist David Graeber of the London School of Economics: “They come across as decent, honest human beings…I don’t think it’s occurred to most young people that a politician could be an honest person.”

base interests

Mother Jones published an article by David Vine, associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., on U.S. foreign policy interests, especially as related to its military bases. He writes:  “Many of our [U.S.] 45 undemocratic base hosts qualify as fully “authoritarian regimes,” according to a democracy index compiled by the Economist. Which means American installations and the troops stationed there are effectively helping block the spread of democracy in countries like Cameroon, Chad, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Niger, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. This support for dictatorship and repression should trouble any American who believes in the principles of our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. After all, one of the long-articulated justifications for maintaining US military bases abroad has been that our military presence protects and spreads democracy.

politics behind closed doors

The Huffington Post carried commentary on U.S. health care politics by Heide Castañeda, associate professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, Jessica Mulligan, associate professor of health policy and management at Providence College, and Mark Schuller, associate professor of anthropology and nonprofit and NGO studies at Northern Illinois University. They write: “While the FBI probe into the Trump administration’s ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 election reached a crescendo, the Republican-led U.S. Senate has been quietly considering their version of the AHCA behind closed doors and with little media attention. Despite the central importance of women’s health in the law and the disproportionate impact it will have on minority communities, all thirteen committee members charged with writing the Senate version of the bill are white men.”

high voltage grief, in a word

National Public Radio (U.S.) launched a podcast series exploring the invisible forces that shape human behavior. The first is about the experience of cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, professor emeritus at Stanford University, after the death of his wife Michelle, also a cultural anthropologist. She fell from a cliff during fieldwork in the Philippines. Earlier they had spent time with a former head-hunting group where they learned of their word, liget, referring in some way to feelings related to loss of a tribal member, inspiring in the past, a head hunting raid. After Michelle’s death, Renato experienced such deep grief that he came to understand liget as a “high voltage” emotion for which he had no term in English.

take that anthro degree and…

…become a health research administrator in higher education. Barbara Koenig is the director of the Bioethics Program at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), located within the Institute for Health and Aging. The program focuses on studying and bringing attention to ethical issues in the medical, research, and healthcare fields. One of the changes Koenig intends to make is to expand the interdisciplinary field across UCSF’s four schools and to integrate ethical reflection into clinical practice, education, and research. Koenig’s interests include genetic research, social values, informed consent, and genomics, and she published widely on these and other topics. At UCSF, she is a professor in residence in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine in the School of Medicine. Her primary appointment is in the School of Nursing’s Institute for Health and Aging. Koenig has a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the University of California and an R.N. degree.

…become a marketing management consultant. Kamal Heydarinezhad is a marketing/corporate affairs manager with Datum Business Consulting Group in Iran. He is responsible for implementing and managing marketing/communication procedures, leading marketing/communication research projects, promoting and selling marketing and communication services to prospective clients, and planning and executing communication, social responsibility, and media relation strategies for specific projects. Heydarinezhad has an M.A. in social anthropology from the University of Pune (India) and an M.B.A. certificate in marketing from Bahar Higher Education Institute (Iran).

…become a government program administrator in health and human services. L.Diane Casto is executive director of Alaska’s Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.  Casto has spent several years working for the state of Alaska in a variety of positions, including as director of the Office of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Most recently, she served as the Behavioral Health Policy Advisor in the Department of Health and Social Services. She got her start in the nonprofit social services arena with her first job after college, however, working with neglected and abused children. She said: “One thing I will say, in all the work I’ve done — from prevention to intervention, working with families and communities — they all tie together…The reality is, how do we deal with these issues? They are all interconnected.” She joked that her mother worried that her degree in anthropology would be useless in the job market, but instead it laid a perfect foundation. Noting that cultural anthropology is all about looking at cultural norms and how societies deal with issues:  “It has served me every day of my life.” Casto has a B.A. in anthropology from Central Washington University and an M.P.A. from the University of Washington.

mummy studies in Lithuania

The New York Times reported on archaeological research involving hundreds of skeletons in a crypt beneath a church in Vilnius, Lithuania, dating from the 17^th-19^th centuries. Twenty-three individuals are carefully mummified, to the extent that flesh, clothing, and organs are intact. The article quotes Dario Piombino-Mascali, an anthropologist from Italy who has studied the mummies since 2011: “They are so well preserved that they almost look alive.” Recently, he and his colleagues have uncovered remnants of the smallpox virus in one of the mummies, offering the possibility of insights into its history.

clues to Harappan diet

An article in The Indian Express described the discovery at Kunal, an early Harappan site in India’s northern state of Haryana, of bones from cooked meat. Sumita Mishra, principal secretary of the Haryana Archaeology and Museums Department, said samples of soil, bones, and charcoal from the site will be tested. Archaeologists involved in the excavation say the bones may belong to Nilgai or breeds of cattle, including buffalo.

programmers hooked on Soylent

Salon reported on the popularity of Soylent, a meal replacement powder, in California’s Silicon Valley. The article quotes Jan English-Lueck, professor of anthropology at San Jose State and Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future. She has been studying Silicon Valley culture for years and points to how “people are fascinated with speed and efficiency.” Further, “Food is very much a part of how we express our culture…Soylent is one form of highly functional, highly efficient food that isn’t going to interfere with your ability be productive.”

luxury cultures

The Huffington Post published an interview with cultural anthropologist David Abèlés, director of the French-Argentine Centre in Buenos Aires, about his latest research on luxury markets and arts around the world. He comments: “We cannot distinguish the trends affecting the industry and commerce of luxury from broader changes within capitalism. Anthropology provides a multifaceted point of view by approaching luxury as a total social artefact.”

rethinking Afghanistan

The Daily Times (Pakistan) carried an article about the longstanding contributions of Magnus Marsden, professor of social anthropology at the University of Sussex and director of the Sussex Asia Centre. Marsden’s latest project focuses on Afghan trading networks and the lived experience of being an Afghan trader in and beyond Afghanistan: “Marsden works to show the human side of Afghan trade and to counter the common stereotypes facing Afghan traders and the Afghan people more broadly through his rich, detailed ethnographic research. Noting that much of the international coverage of Afghanistan focuses on tribal and ethnic divisions and portrays the Afghan people as backward and insular, Marsden aims to convey the sophistication of Afghan traders and their interactions with cultural environments around the world.”

school feeding programs as sharing 

An article in The Times of India about school feeding programs for poor children in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu quotes S. Sumathi, professor and head of the anthropology department at the University of Madras. She says food is not just a basic human necessity, but the glue that binds society through sharing:  “…All rituals or festivals we celebrate, say Diwali or Christmas, revolve round sharing of food. When this sharing of food is implemented at the policy level, it makes a huge physical and emotional impact on the beneficiaries. And one who is fed always remembers.”

tracing a people’s continuity

The Guam Daily Post reported on the research of cultural anthropologist David Atienza Frutos, professor at the University of Guam. His research considers the continuity of the CHamoru cultural experience in spite of the trauma they experienced after the Spanish, Filipinos, and Mexicans arrived in the Mariana Islands. Among other sources, he is consulting historic census documents. Atienza wants to give legitimacy to the CHamoru identity, proving that they can connect themselves to the historical past: “The CHamoru were victimized but they didn’t remain victims…”They were change agents, they were people who made choices for themselves.” He is working on his third television series on the Peopling of the Mariana Islands.

take that anthro degree and…

…become an international peace strategist, author, and consultant. Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini is the co-founder and executive director of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN). For over two decades she has been a leading international peace strategist. In 2000, she was among the civil society drafters of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. In 2011, she was the first Senior Expert on Gender and Inclusion on the UN’s Mediation Standby Team. She has provided guidance and training to senior personnel in UN agencies, governments and NGOs worldwide, and has worked in conflict affected countries globally, including leading assessments in Maoist cantonments in Nepal. She has published extensively on peace and security issues, including the book, Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters. She was the 2014 recipient of the UN Association of the National Capital Area Perdita Huston Award for human rights and the 2016 Greeley Peace Scholar at the University of Massachusetts. She is a member of the board of the UN Democracy Fund, a Senior Fellow of the MIT Center for International Studies, and a Non-Resident Associate of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. She has an M.Phil in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

…become a dancer and activist. Kyle Abraham and his company, Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion, have toured the world, presenting a unique blend of hip-hop, jazz, and contemporary dance that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. His work connects with issues of race, urban violence, civil rights, and incarceration. He calls his style a “postmodern gumbo” — an approach he arrived at by combining his classical dance training from college with the social dance skills of his youth. A 2013 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed a “genius award”), Abraham has a B.A. in anthropology and dance from the State University of New York at Purchase.

…become a food writer, cookbook author, and television star. Gail Simmons has worked as a food columnist for two Canadian newspapers, published a cookbook, and developed several videos. Since the show’s inception in 2006, she has served as a permanent judge on BRAVO’s Emmy-winning series Top Chef. She has been featured in such media outlets as New York Magazine, Travel + Leisure, GQ, People, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times and was named the #1 Reality TV Judge in America by The New York Post. She is an active supporter of Common Threads, an organization that teaches low-income children to cook wholesome, affordable meals. She was a founding member of Food & Wine’s Grow for Good Campaign to raise funds and awareness for sustainable agriculture programs in the United States. Simmons has a B.A. in anthropology and Spanish from McGill University and later attended the Institute of Culinary Education.

…become a business manager. Collins Moore is a business manager with NFC Africa Kenya Limited. His work involves identifying potential customers, creating contacts, developing new opportunities for the company, handling business activities of the company, providing customer support assistance to clients, and producing proposals and invoices for clients. He has a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Nairobi.

excavation versus preservation by not excavating

As reported in The Daily Mail, archaeologists disagree about whether or not to undertake further excavations at Mohenjo Daro, a Bronze Age site in Pakistan. The site faces multiple challenges including extreme heat and damage from humans. On one side, is Michael Jansen, a researcher at GUTech University of Technology in Oman, who favors further excavations along with promotion of the site around the world and finding ways to preserve the excavated area. He comments that “There is enormous thermo-stress,” adding that salt from the underground water table is also damaging the ruins. Tourists and the use of the site for public events add to the stress. Yet he argues for further excavation because so little of the site has been uncovered so far and therefore much is to be learned. Other experts, however, argue against further excavation: “It is actually preserved when it is buried,” said Richard Meadow, senior lecturer in the anthropology department at Harvard University.

Brexit and academic funding

A short article in The Financial Times noted the implications of Brexit for various disciplines in British academia as detailed in a recent report. Some fields of study, including archaeology, are more dependent on EU funding than others.

What are the relationships between body, health, mobility and urban environments? What happens when these connections are out of balance? And how do traffic and mobility—by vehicle or bicycle—fit into this equation?

These are some of the questions undergraduate students creatively explored this spring in Duke Global Health Institute assistant professor Harris Solomon’s Anthropology and Global Health seminar, which centered around the theme of injury, with ghost bikes as a case study.

The course culminated in three final small group projects—a podcast, a community action event and a website. Each group focused on a different ghost bike in Durham, North Carolina.

GHOST BIKES: MEMORIALS AND PROMPTS FOR CAUTION

A ghost bike is a bicycle that’s painted white and left at a site where a cyclist was fatally injured by a collision with a motor vehicle. Ghost bikes serve as both memorials and reminders to motorists to share the road safely with cyclists. Each ghost bike has its own unique adornments, such as flowers, a photo, the deceased cyclist’s name or a written message.

The first ghost bike was created in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2003; currently, more than 630 ghost bikes can be found in more than 200 locations across the world.

STUDENTS EXPLORE CONCEPT OF GHOST BIKES THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHY

The idea to focus on ghost bikes came to Solomon, an assistant professor in cultural anthropology and global health, through his own research project on traffic accidents in Mumbai, India. The National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant that funds the project includes an educational component, and Solomon saw the seminar as an opportunity to bridge his research and teaching. He engaged his students in ethnographic research that explores the relationships between humans, health and urban environments—topics that parallel his research in India.

Students considered the meaning of ghost bikes as memorials as well as statements about the challenges bicyclists face in traversing urban areas like Durham, where motor vehicles tend to rule the road and where urban density is rapidly changing. Students also explored the local controversy around of ghost bikes; a city policy established in 2015 enables the city to remove ghost bikes upon receiving one complaint.

Solomon encouraged students to spend time conducting observations in the bike locations, writing and analyzing field notes, talking with locals and people with personal connections to the cyclist, learning more about the incidents that led to the cyclists’ deaths and meeting with city officials who set and implement local traffic and cycling policies.

With support from the Franklin Humanities Institute’s new Health Humanities Lab, which Solomon co-directs, he also hosted a visiting scholar, Lochlann Jain, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Jain’s research, which the students had been studying throughout the semester, focuses on how injuries often connect the fields of medicine and law in unexpected ways. Jain joined the class to discuss their own ghost bike research and to provide feedback on the students’ projects.

“The students learned to think about how a single crash changes what we take for granted as the guarantee of global health. This was intense fieldwork around a single object, and the students were phenomenal, reflective and ethical researchers,” said Solomon. “They studied the ghost bikes as sentinels of the collateral bodily damage of urban change and considered the potent policy implications of this evolution.”

STUDENTS FLEX CREATIVE MUSCLES IN GROUP PROJECTS

Each group of students explored their assigned ghost bike through a different medium, including a podcast, a community action event and a website.

Podcast 

The group focused on the ghost bike on Hillandale Road, which memorializes cyclist Seth Vidal, produced a podcast. Through conversations with members of national and international transportation safety organizations, a Durham city official, a local cycling activist and Vidal’s partner, the students explored several key questions:

• What do ghost bikes mean to the family and friends of the deceased cyclist?
• How do ghost bikes impact the local community?
• Whom does the road belong to?
• Does a city have the right to remove these memorials?

The project gave Jeremy Gottlieb ’18, a global health and cultural anthropology major and member of the podcast group, a deeper understanding of entanglements. For example, he said, “Seth Vidal’s ghost bike is intertwined with road infrastructure, car culture in America, the new focus on traffic accidents in global health, the Hillandale community and the lives of Seth’s friends and family.” And now, he reflected, he has a relationship with this memorial and is in his own way entangled with it.

Listen to the podcast.

Community Action Event 

On April 21, the student group assigned to the ghost bike honoring cyclist Kent Winberry at the intersection of Duke University Road and West Chapel Hill Street held an awareness-building event on the Duke campus.

They shared information with students about ghost bikes and cycling safety and solicited students’ help in decorating a ghost bike—borrowed from the Durham Bike Co-Op—with tissue paper flowers. The students plan to transfer the flowers from the bike to a wreath that will be placed on the actual ghost bike memorializing Winberry.

“This semester we combined our fieldwork with rich discussions to define and redefine the implications of what it means for something to be ‘global health,’” said McKenzie Hollen ’17, a global health and cultural anthropology major. “We attempted to make the global local and the local global. Bringing the ghost bike to campus furthered our engagement of ‘the local’—blurring the lines between Duke and Durham.”

Click on the image below to view a time-lapse video of the event:

Anthropology, Global Health and Ghost Bikes

Website 

A third group of students focused on the ghost bike at the intersection of Roxboro Street and Chateau Road, honoring cyclist Tony Turner. They created a website with information about ghost bikes and Turner, as well as photos and reflective essays related to the project.

Amanda Brumwell ’17, a global health and biology major and member of the group that created the website, enjoyed the class and the project. “I had always considered anthropology an important aspect of global health, but this class taught me how to consider health, harm and death in a new anthropological light,” she said. “We were compelled to ask questions like, ‘What’s at stake in memorializing a death?’ and ‘How does one’s environment lead to injury?’ to consider both tangible and intangible components of harm and death in a ghost bike.”

Click on the image below to view the website:

This summer, Solomon’s NSF grant will support an additional group of students to study the relations between traffic, injury, and mobility in Durham. The project, part of Duke’s Data+ program, connects students in cultural anthropology, global health, the Health Humanities Lab and the Information Initiative at Duke.

Note: This post is republished from Global Health Institute at Duke University, with permission

a wall is not the answer

A piece in TIME magazine on the U.S. Mexico border quotes Jason De León, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, who has conducted long-term studies of undocumented border crossings: “As soon as security is increased [in one place], it’s the balloon affect — you grab one area and the flow goes to another area.” He and other experts say that a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, like the fences that are in place now, will not deter immigrants who are willing to risk their lives to cross the border.

stopping police violence

USA Today carried an article by Sirry Alang, assistant of cultural anthropology professor in the Health, Medicine and Society Program in Lehigh University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She offers a seven-point list of what people in the U.S. can do to end police violence and create a more equitable society in the U.S. They include advocacy work, learning about structural violence, and remembering those who have been killed.

take that anthro degree and…

…become a musician. Sharon McNally is a singer, guitarist, and songwriter living in Mississippi. Her latest album is entitled Black Irish. She says: “All I know is that I play American music, specific to a place and a time and a setting. Now we all live in an information age, where we have access to 100 years or more of music history, and a lot of us are loosely grouped as Americana artists. I’m less concerned with what we call it, than how it makes me feel, but I love blues, soul, rock … and the cradle of it all is basically between Memphis and Mississippi. When you get down to it, there are only 12 notes on the basic American scale, and you can call it whatever you want.”  McNally has a B.A. in anthropology from Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

…become a medical doctor. Lurit Bepo is a doctor specializing in internal medicine. She will spend her residency at the University of California, San Francisco, placement which meshes with her focus on community health, advocacy, and policy. Health policy decisions are more than just partisan jousting, she argues: “Health policy is so relevant right now, and impacts such a large number of people. There’s a tendency to think that not having medical insurance doesn’t kill people, but it does.” Bepo has a B.A. in anthropology and biology from Washington University St. Louis and an M.D./M.P.H. degree from Emory University.

…become an optometrist. Kelly De Simone is owner/CEO at Eye Priority, P.C, a family eye care facility in Phoenix, offering a personalized vision experience for clients of all ages.  She is a member of the Physician Board at the American Health Council where she shares her knowledge and expertise in optometry, eye care, and patient care. De Simone has a B.A. in anthropology from Pennsylvania State University and an O.D. from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry.

new light on the Bell Beaker Culture

The Daily Mail reported on a major genomic study offering insights about the arrival and spread of the Bell Beaker Culture, also called the Beaker Culture, in Britain around 4,000 years ago during the Bronze Age. Named after the shape of its signature clay vessels, the Beaker Culture may have displaced the resident Neolithic occupants. The analysis suggests that that Britain underwent a greater than 90 per cent shift in its genetic make-up after the arrival of the Bell Beaker people. While the Daily Mail article and an article in Scientific American hyperbolically use the term “invasion,” Marc Vander Linden, an archaeologist at University College London, says that many researchers prefer to call the spread the “Bell Beaker phenomenon.” 

the search goes on

BBC News carried a lengthy article reviewing some of the many steps in the search, since Darwin, for the “last common ancestor” (LCA) of humans and apes, also informally termed “the missing link.” At this point, scientists have narrowed the search to a rough location and have ideas about its morphology and behavior.  The piece draws on research from a variety of fields including anthropology. Several anthropologists are mentioned: Jeffrey Schwartz, Owen Lovejoy, Tracy Kivell, Sergio Almécija, and David Begun. 

kudos

The Government of Japan has bestowed the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette on Joy Hendry, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University. The award is in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the promotion of Japanese studies in the U.K., and to deeper mutual understanding between Japan and the United Kingdom. Commenting about the honor, Hendry said: “I am delighted and humbled to receive such an award, but I also need to thank all my Japanese friends, as well as colleagues and grant-giving bodies on both sides of the world that have made my work possible. Anthropologists cannot achieve such things alone.”

Families and people of all ages are encouraged to take part in “The Many Stories of Main Street,” an interpretive downtown Lexington walking tour where one can learn about past generations who lived and worked in Lexington’s historic buildings.

The tour is based on research comprised of both archival and oral history, completed over the past few years by anthropology students at Washington and Lee University. “Students taking a variety of courses, including the Anthropology of American History and Qualitative Methods, researched the original owners and proprietors of downtown Lexington’s historic buildings and developed interesting and engaging ways to tell their stories,” said Alison Bell, associate professor of anthropology at W&L.

“The students’ work also highlights the importance of historic preservation. Many of these buildings were saved by Historic Lexington Foundation, and without their work to preserve them we would not be able to learn from and enjoy them today.”

There are six stops on the free, family-friendly tour of North Main Street, which begins at the old Courthouse Square, at the intersection of Main and Washington Streets, and ends at First Baptist Church, on Saturday, May 13 from 2 pm – 4 pm.

Written by: Drewry Sackett

Note: This post is republished from Washington and Lee, the Columns, with permission

French election and refugees 

An article in The Huffington Post by two anthropologists says that the French election is good news for refugees: “Macron’s win marks a small victory for the left and anti-populist movements, especially for the millions of forced migrants seeking refuge in Europe. Macron ran on an immigration platform that commended German chancellor Angela Merkel’s generous refugee policy and promised to prioritize asylum issues in his first six months in office.” The authors are Elizabeth Wirtz, doctoral candidate in anthropology at Purdue University, Mark Schuller, associate professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University and affiliate at the State University of Haiti.

anumerism as a way of life

The Conversation published an article by linguistic anthropologist Caleb Everett, Andrew Carnegie Fellow and professor of anthropology at Miami University, on anumerism, or the practice of not using many words for numbers:  “Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded deep in Amazonia, living along branches of the world’s largest river tree. Instead of using words for precise quantities, these people rely exclusively on terms analogous to ‘a few’ or ‘some…’” In a new book, I explore the ways in which humans invented numbers, and how numbers subsequently played a critical role in other milestones, from the advent of agriculture to the genesis of writing.”

Continue reading “anthro in the news 5/15/17” →

The most powerful influences on human health are not the foods we eat or whether we have access to medical care, but how societies are organized, how power is distributed, and how some people are better positioned to make healthy choices than others, decades of public health research have shown.

These “upstream” factors are at the heart of Syndemics, a field of applied health research with roots in medical anthropology. UConn professor of anthropology Merrill Singer coined the term – a combination of “synergy” and “epidemic” – in the 1990s, and authored a 2009 textbook on the concept. Last month, the leading British medical journal, The Lancet, published a special series on the topic, featuring papers by Singer and UConn assistant professor of anthropology Sarah Willen, among others. The series grew out of a 2015 workshop co-sponsored by the Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights, of which Willen is director, at UConn’s Human Rights Institute.

She and an interdisciplinary team of researchers with an interest in migration co-authored the third of three papers in the series. Drawing on a variety of case studies, they consider how an approach that combines insights from syndemics and human rights can advance research, public health, and clinical care for migrant populations – all growing concerns in the face of rising anti-immigrant politics and policies in the United States and abroad.

In a recent interview with UConn Today, Willen discusses the significance of the series, her paper, and this innovative way of studying and confronting health inequities.

Continue reading “social conditions play major role in migrant health” →