C ult u re s, Mi nds , and M ed i c in es Work s hops that structural inequality impacts childhood experience, and the ways in which applied research can identify spaces for political intervention. In December we heard from Clara Han, MD/Ph.D, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins, who talked to us about speaking to the dead and the experience of medical care for those in desperate poverty and amid violence.
Cultures, Minds and Medicines has had yet another terrific year in which undergraduates, graduate students, medical students, residents and faculty gather to hear talks about human health and suffering from different disciplinary perspectives. We hear from artists, scientists, ethnographers, historians and more, with the goal of understanding not only what they say, but also what counts as data for them and how they understand their task in communicating to their primary audience. In October, we heard from Michael Nedelman, a medical student (Stanford 2016) and a documentary filmmaker (http://www.camouflagecloset.com/). He spoke about what the film-maker lens has added to his understanding of the health and identity issues. Then we heard from Keith Humphries, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford, who spoke to us about addiction and about how and why Alcoholics Anonymous actually works. November brought Susan Levine, an anthropologist at the University of Cape Town, who has been interested in the way
Our winter quarter began with the anthropologist Miriam Ticktin, now Associate Professor at the New School, and one of our own: she got her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford. She spoke about the way that an apparent compassionate act—offering refugee status to immigrants with specific illnesses—had unintended consequences. In February we heard from Jeanne Tsai, Associate Professor in the Psychology Department here at Stanford, who described cultural differences in the way people value emotional experience and consequences for clinical work. Then our own Lochlann Jain talked about the process of writing her compelling book Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us. Nearly half of us will be diagnosed with invasive cancer during our lifetimes. The term concluded with an interdisciplinary group--Beatriz Labate, PhD, an anthropologist; Clancy Cavnar, a clinical psychologist; and Brian Anderson, medical student at Stanford—who spoke about their work on the healing power of ayahuasca. This spring we brought Vincanne Adams down to speak to us from UCSF, where she is an anthropologist and Professor in their interdisciplinary department in the UCSF Medical School. She described the risks associated with the new push to treat all medical outcomes in global health as measurable by experiment and comparison. Then Christopher Dole, an anthropologist at Amherst, described to us life after the terrible earthquake in Turkey, and the cultural shaping of living with unbearable loss. We still have two speakers to hear from at the time of writing: Daniel Mason, novelist and psychiatric resident here at Stanford, who will talk about schizophrenia and the art made by people struggling with psychosis, and Scott Stonington, MD/PhD, who will describe end-of-life issues in Thailand and what he calls the "The Spirit Ambulance.” It’s been a great ride, and we are looking forward to next year!
Careers in Information Technology (continued from PG 9) know one another and are happy to recommend qualified persons to different companies if jobs are available, so reaching out is always in one’s best interest. To succeed in the IT sector, individuals must be willing to alter their methodology to accommodate available resources and goals as well as exhibit flexibility in the timescale of the project and the type of people you work with. Anthropologists in the IT sector must also be able to navigate the often tricky waters of politics. While a few companies give researchers the option to opt out of certain research projects for ethical or political reasons, many do not. A recurring theme of those working in IT is that the value of social scientists in the private sector is helping those you work with to understand that their questions need to be reframed.
VOLUME 7
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2013 / 2014 NEWSLETTER
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ANTHROPOLOGY
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