Spring Quarter 2013
3:30-5:00 pm
Schedule
Food Politics Workshop Series
Sponsored by Sociocultural Anthropology and MAGH
Monday, April 8
Ann Anagnost
“Securing the Home Front: The Pursuit of ‘Natural Living’ among Evangelical Christian Homemakers“
Denny Hall, 401
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Food Politics Workshop Series
Sponsored by Sociocultural Anthropology and MAGH
Monday, April 22
Megan Carney
“Nourishing Neoliberalism” (from her manuscript in progress Feeding Labors: Women’s Migration and Food Insecurity in Transnational Spaces of Care) Discussant: Emily Yates-Doerr
Denny Hall, 401
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Department of Anthroplogy DIssertation Colloquium
Wednesday, May 8
Anna Zogas
Sociocultural Anthropology PhC
Denny Hall, 401
3:30-5:00pm
"A Signature Wound: Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, Medical Uncertainty, and Disability in the U.S. Military Healthcare System"
Advisor: Rhodes
Mild traumatic brain injury (mild TBI), commonly known as concussion, is an injury sustained with such frequency by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq that it has been called a “signature wound” of these two protracted wars. Unlike amputations and shrapnel wounds, which are caused by the same combat conditions but are highly visible injuries, mild TBI is an “invisible wound” in two senses: first, there are no outward bodily signs that indicate a person is impaired by mild TBI, and second, doctors have not identified any detectable, physiological brain damage that accounts for patients’ persistent post-combat symptoms. Nevertheless, mild TBI is thought to have lasting effects on brain function and has been highlighted as a physical brain injury with cognitive and behavioral symptoms: balance and memory problems, mood swings, anger and irritability, and personality changes. My research explores how this “invisible wound,” simultaneously a political classification and a medical classification, becomes visible in the VA’s medical system through research, diagnosis, and disability compensation procedures. In this talk I will give an overview of my research questions and methods, and I will report preliminary findings from ethnographic research that will be ongoing through 2014.
Department of Anthroplogy DIssertation Colloquium
Monday, May 13
Evi Sutrsino
Sociocultural Anthropology PhC
Denny Hall, 401
10:00am - 12:00noon
"Negotiating religiosity with a 'secular' state: Confucianism and Religious Politics in Indonesia"
Advisor: Lowe
Food Politics Workshop Series
Sponsored by Sociocultural Anthropology and MAGH
Monday, May 13
Devon Peña
“The End of Food Sovereignty? AlterNative Autonomy and the Remaking of Value Theory”
Discussant: Ann Anagnost
Denny Hall, 401
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Visiting Scholar Lecture
Sponsored by Sociocultural Anthropology and MAGH
Monday, May 20
Marieke van Eijk
"Can institutions care? Psychotherapeutic orthodoxies, clinical practices, and institutional trajectories in U.S. transgender care"
Denny Hall, 401
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Health care institutions play a pivotal role in the development of novel therapeutic remedies, the organization of care, and the distribution of resources and services. Yet they are severely criticized for criminalizing, pathologizing and disciplining those individuals who deviate from socially sanctioned norms. Teaching people where they fit on the official scheme of things, institutions often reproduce prevailing norms of human ontology that are operative in society. Yet, drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a university-based gender identity clinic in the United States, I demonstrate that while some institutions reproduce dominant cultural frameworks, others give rise to bodies and selves that deviate from mainstream norms of gender and sex and generate alternative orthodoxies of how to care for gender non-conforming individuals in a gender-binary world. To understand the intricacies of these psychotherapeutic practices and their conditions of emergence, I suggest an alternative approach to the study of institutions in present-day. Rather than solely drawing upon dominant analytic frameworks that emphasize institutions’ regulatory and disciplinary practices, I propose to use a care approach instead. Work in healthcare institutions, like in human service organizations in general, is “moral” work, packed with personal and institutional judgments of social worth, suffering, and deservingness. Analyzing transgender care practices, I call for a renewed attention to the study of healthcare institutions in late capitalist times, by attending not only to their disciplinary regimes but also to all those actions that focus on how to best care in times of need.
Bio:
Marieke van Eijk, PhD recently finished her PhD in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She received a MA in political science, with a specialization in gender and sexuality studies, and a MA in religion studies, both from the University of Amsterdam and completed cum laude. In her PhD research she analyzed the provision of transgender care practices in the United States. The research draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Midwestern university-based gender identity clinic. A key argument in the dissertation is that transgender care is, like any other medical discipline, a field in biomedicine that is conditioned by fiscal calculations, insurance structures, healthcare reform, and conflicting socio-medical ideologies of health and wellbeing, processes that profoundly shape daily clinical life. Grounded simultaneously in medical anthropology and gender studies, the dissertation aims to contribute to the understanding of Western biomedicine and its relationships with finance, institutions, care, gender, and practice. Marieke is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and is currently a visiting scholar at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington.
Food Politics Workshop Series
Sponsored by Sociocultural Anthropology and MAGH
Monday, June 3
Emily Yates-Doerr
“Bodies in Balance” (from her manuscript in progress, The Weight of the Body: Fatness, Nourishment, and Health in Translation)
Discussant: Megan Carney
Denny Hall, 213
3:30-5:00 p.m.