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| Interdisciplinary Fellowship Program |
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Past
Fellows of CHCS Program |
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Beyond my research and quite unexpectedly, this year has also showed me the problems and possibilities that still exist in transforming academic links into an operational reality, or translating the science and research on war into projects that actually assist populations in danger. Those of us in the academic world have the luxury of physical and temporal distance from these violent situations, facilitating analysis and the generation of knowledge. On the other side of the issues, practitioners are faced with devastated populations on the brink of disaster and have no time for analysis. Reflection can only occur at the end of such interventions and is usually in the form of program assessments. Even here, while these evaluations may be able to identify logistical difficulties in implementation, more profound and fundamental understandings of the dynamics of conflict are missing. How then can the research being generating by both public health and the humanities move out of the journals and into developing more effective interventions to assist populations affected by severe violence? The CHCS Fellowship has allowed me to develop the skill-set needed for my immediate research goals. However, it has also profoundly shaped my larger career goals of creating a multi-disciplinary operational aspect out of this space of articulation between public health and the humanities." |
| Steven Girardot "As a doctoral student in chemistry, I have spent most of my academic training in the laboratory setting, researching very detailed and specific hypotheses using highly controlled experiments. When I joined the research group of Dr. Barry Ryan, however, I entered into an entirely foreign world of public health. The research focus of our group is in the field of exposure assessment. We look at ways of applying fundamental chemical techniques to measure pollutants in the environment. These pollutants may be present in air, water, soil, food, or other biological media and often require development of novel techniques to analyze. A second goal of our research is to understand the impact of these pollutants on humans. It is primarily this second aim that connects chemistry with public health, making our research highly interdisciplinary. My dissertation project has involved a large field study of air pollution in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), located on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The Park experiences high concentrations of ozone (O3) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) which often exceed federal limits. In addition to measuring and modeling these pollutants, we sought to understand their potential health affects on people who recreate there. To that end, an epidemiologic study of day hikers, assessing pre- and post-hike lung function and relating that to pollutant levels, was included in the project. At the project’s onset, I was confident in my abilities to perform the analytic chemistry components, but I immediately realized that I had no background or training to manage an epidemiologic study. Not only did I lack the knowledge of how to design and execute experiments that involved human participants, but also I lacked training in the appropriate statistical methods I would need to address our hypotheses. I therefore began taking a few courses in biostatistics and epidemiology to complement my coursework in chemistry. After taking the introductory methods course (EPI 530), I took an instant interest to epidemiology and became determined to gain more knowledge of this discipline. The Center for Health, Culture, and Society (CHCS) Fellowship program has enabled me to fulfill this goal. Through the CHCS support, I spent the last year immersed in the School of Public Health, taking advanced courses in epidemiologic methods, statistical modeling, and biostatistics. I also took elective courses in complex survey analysis, geographical information systems, and clinical trials- subjects not directly related to my research needs, but they allowed me to gain a breadth of knowledge I would not have otherwise gained. Equally as important as my courses, however, has been the vast number of career opportunities that have been afforded me as a result of my cross-training in public health. Having knowledge both in chemistry and epidemiology allows me to the ability to communicate with professionals in both areas to more effectively address research needs. One of the weakest parts of many environmental epidemiologic studies is the exposure assessment. Because I now understand what epidemiologists need to improve their study designs, I can work with exposure assessors, who are primarily chemists and biologists, to meet those needs. Overall, the CHCS fellowship program has given me the opportunity to include formal training in public health as a part of my doctoral work here at Emory. My personal and professional growth during this fellowship have been tremendous, and I am proud that when I leave Emory, I will have an affiliation with the Rollins School of Public Health. I am very grateful to the Center, its administrators, and associated faculty, especially Dr. Peter Brown, for the opportunity and support. Whether my career path leads me to a formal career in chemical research, public health research, or academia, my training this year will prove to be an asset." |
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"Throughout my year as a Fellow with the Center for Health, Culture, and Society, I explored film and photography and their uses in health research and communication. My interest in this area began when I worked for an Ohio State Senator for a year prior to starting graduate school. I spent many hours talking to constituents and lobbyists about various types of legislation. When the day came for a particular bill to pass, the Senators and Representatives were greatly influenced by photographs and videos addressing the specific issues of the bill. They would receive pages and pages of information about various aspects of the legislation, but visual representations often presented the most powerful way to influence policy change.
This past year I had the opportunity to take courses in Anthropology, Film Studies, and Art History. Through a combination of applied and theory courses, I strengthened my understanding of visual representations as tools for social change. I took several applied courses where I learned the basics of shooting photographs and creating videos. I also took a Film Studies course, which taught me the effects of the camera’s movement and editing techniques used to bring across ideas and emotions. As a result, I am now unable to watch anything on the television screen without analyzing the intended message the producers are attempting to convey to the viewer. In this course, I also had the opportunity to work with Atlanta Video and The Task Force for Child Survival and Development on a multi-cultural parenting video. As part of this directed study, I was able to see how behavioral science theories were incorporated into a video script and then produced into a video. This combination of theoretical approach and applied skills allowed me to better understand the creation of visual images.
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"In her essay “Missing Persons: African American Women, AIDS, and the History of Disease,” Evelynn Hammonds states, “Women have historically received unequal treatment in the United States health care system. African American women, as evidenced by their higher rates of many diseases, have long been among the least served by the health care system.” Why are Black women “among the least served by the health care system” and why do African American women suffer from higher rates of many diseases relative to the general population? How do the systems of racism, sexism, and classism influence the health of African American women and the health care that these women receive? What historical experiences of African American women have influenced their current health status in American society, and how have public policies affected their health? I explored these questions this year through the CHCS Interdisciplinary Fellowship Program by accomplishing two main tasks: 1) Defining the major systems of oppression, and 2) Defining the experiences of African American women in relation to these systems. My ultimate goal through the CHCS Fellowship was to determine what factors need to be addressed and what strategies should be utilized to improve the health of Black women. This year was extraordinary. I took classes in Women’s Studies (Feminist Theory, Global Black Feminisms), ILA (Selling the Body), History (20th Century African American History, The New South), and English (Interdisciplinary African American Studies). I investigated such varied topics as stereotypes of Black womanhood, housing segregation, the plight of Black female domestic workers in the South, the history of segregated hospitals, restrictions on the reproductive freedoms of Black women, the role of historical “memory” in shaping African Americans’ views of the healthcare system, and much more. Additionally, I presented a paper at an Emory conference on public display and dissection of Black female bodies in the 19th century. I learned valuable information and skills that have helped me to think more comprehensively about public health and the health of African American women. I was privy to the on-going discussions and research taking place outside of the field of public health that hold promise for improving the health and lives of African American women. As the year progressed, I found myself gravitating more toward the topic of representations of Black female sexuality and issues surrounding sexual violence against Black women. I plan to continue my interdisciplinary research within an American Studies MA/PhD program at the College of William and Mary in Virginia next year. Thank you to the Center for a wonderful fellowship experience." |
"I graduated from the School of Public Health with a skill-set tailored to public health work in an international setting, obtained through rigorous coursework and field research experience. Although this prepared me for a career in public health practice, I felt my inventory of skills would be strengthened through broader understanding of the theoretical and academic perspectives that underlie the work I intend to do. Through the Health, Culture, and Society Fellowship I gained knowledge in feminist theory and Middle Eastern studies as a basis for both field research and program planning. This past year I specifically pursued a course of study marrying my interest in women and the Middle East within the context of a broader humanities discourse. What I felt I lacked, and what I sought to gain from the CHCS Fellowship, was a theoretical base and broader academic perspective necessary for a comprehensive understanding of my subject material. My specific weakness in theory was most notable during the writing of my Masters thesis on family changes and longterm care in the Cairo. During the thesis process I came to believe that without being informed by a broader understanding of regional culture and theory, I will be unable to anchor the trends I observe to their sociopolitical determinants. Thus, I applied for the CHCS Fellowship. One of the goals that has guided my career plan is to translate the skills and knowledge of my academic training into real benefits felt by the community. After working as a community health educator in Turkmenistan for two years, I realized that international health and development was my passion. What prompted me to continue my education rather than remain working overseas was a simple online job search for my ideal future position. However, each position, each possible future, while promising challenges and adventure, also required a range of skills I did not possess. It is for this reason I came to Rollins. I then chose to pursue the CHCS Fellowship as an opportunity not only to be better suited for those positions, but also to use the knowledge obtained to improve the quality of my work. I have to wonder how important my present and future research could be if I am not able fit the ideas into a broader framework, relating results to the experiences of others, and using the information gained for as extensive a benefit as possible. None of these things are achievable if I do not speak the language of the social science discipline and am not familiar with the major concepts of the field of humanities. In some ways, what I got out of the Fellowship was different than what I expected. I hoped to emerge a year later understanding the monolithic concept of Theory (note the capital “T”). Really, what was I thinking? Although the learning curve was very steep, I barely scratched the surface of feminist theory. While I have much further to go, the year provided me with a great introduction to the many and complex facets of feminist theory. I now feel much more comfortable with theory and confident in my abilities to understand and apply it. The year on main campus also taught me to be much more critical of how concepts are applied and how programs are planned both in the work of others and in my own work. The critical reflection of Women’s Studies courses and the cultural insights from the Middle Eastern Studies courses made my one-year fellowship both valuable and applicable." |
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"I entered the Anthropology graduate program at Emory with a sincere desire to apply what I learned to the cause of remedying global inequality. The Center for Health, Culture, and Society fellowship has made me both bolder and more humble. Bolder because I now see more clearly than before the appalling scale of the problem; more humble because I realize that, although I’ve made a great deal of progress, I don’t yet have all the tools I need for the job. The topic I originally planned to study was the relationship between primary education and economic development in poor countries. How does schooling contribute to bringing people out of poverty? How can obstacles to schooling be removed? How can more effective education policies be implemented? To answer these questions, I chose to look at the case of Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world. During my first visit to Ethiopia in 2003, I realized it would be essential to consider health and disease when thinking about the contribution of schooling to economic development there. I came to feel that to ignore health issues would be impractical and unethical. I especially wanted to learn about HIV/AIDS, which was said to be killing Ethiopia’s teachers faster than new ones could be trained. Taking part in a Paul Farmer reading group with other CHCS fellows had already begun to change the way I looked at health. In Farmer’s view, all disease can be seen as an expression of inequity. Taking health into account when thinking about global inequity, I found, gave urgency to arguments about the unfairness of the distribution of resources. Deprivation of drugs and hospital care, the economic means to live a decent life, and the education to compete in a job market, all expose people to higher chances of early death. But learning about diseases, I found, constituted only half the work in the Global Health program. Many classes and readings were devoted to appraising different kinds of interventions. “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he can feed himself:” so went a saying that I heard more than once in Global Health classes. The tendency was to criticize interventions that focussed on meeting immediate needs, in contrast with interventions that provided for longer-term needs. My initial reaction to this was suspicion. It seemed to me that my teachers in Public Health underestimated both the structural barriers that people contend with, and people’s natural ingenuity. There are, after all, few places in the world today where people have the opportunity to fish but don’t know already how to do it. Soon, however, I found myself able to engage in debates about interventions on the same terms as my peers in Public Health: I found value in evaluating interventions in terms of efficacy and pragmatism. And looking back on Anthropology, I came to recognize its limitations. If Public Health underestimates the structural barriers that people contend with, Anthropology just as often emphasizes these barriers to the extent of denying the possibility of alternatives. The challenge, I have realized, is to design interventions that are sensitive both to local constraints and to strategies that have worked elsewhere. And that is what cross training in anthropology and public health has equipped me for. In the spring semester, I followed the example of my classmates and applied for an internship at CARE. While my classes in Public Health have caused the mystique around the domain of health to fall away, working in CARE’s Basic and Girls’ Education Unit during the past months has helped erode the mystique that surrounds the development industry. I now see more clearly than before both the scale of the problem of global inequity and a role for myself in contributing to its undoing. What further tools do I need for the job? One tool I want is a modicum of clinical knowledge: some training in how to minister to the most common health problems in individuals. I see this as an important complement to the population-level view of health and disease that is taught in Public Health. As my father has said, it would be a shame if I went to work in public health hardly knowing how to put a Band-Aid on a wound in the event of an emergency. Another tool I want is more experience in Ethiopia: more knowledge of the people, languages, cultures, and politics of the country: the context into which all interventions, education and health programs, are introduced. I feel lucky to be in a position to get these tools under my belt.
To get some clinical knowledge, I’m planning to pursue training
as an Emergency Medical Technician. And as I move into the field research
stage of my Anthropology degree, I will be able to pick up more experience
of life -- and death -- in Ethiopia.
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"As a doctoral candidate in medical anthropology, I cannot overstate
my gratitude for the opportunity to have spent this year as a Fellow
at the Center for Health, Culture, and Society. While I expect it will
take considerable time for the impact of this experience to sink in,
I would like to use this opportunity to highlight five areas of impact
that are already becoming clear. These include: In these ways and others, I can say with confidence that the CHCS
fellowship has greatly strengthened my knowledge, skills, confidence,
and potential professional pathways as a medical anthropologist. Second, classes in International Health/Global Health have provided me with a much-strengthened understanding of both the theoretical and institutional foundations of this growing field. These classes have also helped me begin to think critically about the potential interventions my own field – Anthropology in general and Medical Anthropology in particular – can make to understanding how policies and programs are developed, implemented, evaluated, and improved. Third, this year’s formal and informal encounters with leading scholars and researchers have also helped me think about the potential contributions of my own field, and my own research, to the sometimes overwhelming task of addressing health inequities of both local and global scope. I am particularly grateful to CHCS for its sponsorship of a fall lecture and student workshop with Susan Erikson, who is a medical anthropologist, a former professional in the field of international development, and the current director of an innovative program at the University of Denver designed to cultivate global health leadership (and leaders) through a unique graduate training program. Erikson’s talk drew a large and animated crowd of students, faculty, and professionals from Emory and from the broader Atlanta public health community, and I am delighted that CHCS was willing and able to bring her to Emory. I have also deeply appreciated the opportunity to hear, and meet with, other CHCS speakers including in particular Merrill Singer, William Dressler, Mimi Nichter, and Sidney Halpern. Beyond RSPH coursework and the CHCS lecture series, I also had the
opportunity to represent CHCS at four scholarly conferences: 1) “Rethinking
Infectious Disease” at the University of Michigan in November
2004, 2) “Lessons Learned from Rights-Based Approaches to Health”
in Atlanta in April 2005; 3) “Rethinking Inequalities and Differences
in Medicine: An Interdisciplinary Conference,” at Vanderbilt University’s
Center for Medicine, Health and Society in April 2005, where CHCS co-director
Peter Brown and I both represented Emory and the Center and where I
presented a paper titled “Illegal” Migration Status as Axis
of Health Inequality”; and 3) the Society for Applied Anthropology
Annual Meetings in Santa Fe, New Mexico in April 2005, where I co-coordinated
a panel on “irregular” migration and presented a paper titled
“Toward a Critical Phenomenology of ‘Illegality’:
State Power and Abject/ivity among Undocumented West Africans in Tel
Aviv, Israel.” The papers presented on the panel in Santa Fe –
several of which deal directly with issues of “illegal”
migration and public health – are now being revised for publication
as a special issue of the journal International Migration, where authors
will be challenged to elaborate some of the policy implications of our
research. Second, I have begun to think about my work in relation to a relatively new area of public health research, policy, and praxis that speaks directly to the central issues within my dissertation research: the area of “public health ethics.” Early in the academic year, I remember throwing out the possibility of a “public health ethics” framework for discussion at a CHCS seminar. To the best of my recollection, we were unable to generate much conversation on the topic. As I learned very recently, a small but growing body of research in this area does exist, but it has not yet garnered much attention. Moreover, these conversations do not yet touch upon the “public health ethics” issues generated by processes like the one I analyze in my dissertation: developed states’ simultaneous economic reliance on and institutional neglect of undocumented migrants and their health care needs. As such, I am particularly eager to begin familiarizing myself and taking part in this exciting new conversation within public health. As I hope this report has amply demonstrated, my year as a CHCS fellow has filled in gaps in my existing knowledge and skill set as a medical anthropologist; it has strengthened my understanding of the fields of public health and global health in theoretical, institutional, and practical terms; it has afforded me the opportunity to meet and network with key scholars in my own and related fields; it has helped me develop new ideas for future research; and it has enabled me to begin thinking in better informed and more critical ways about the potential theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions a critical medical anthropologist like myself might be able to make. Overall, my CHCS experience will have a profound and lasting impact both on my professional development and on my scholarly research, and I am deeply grateful for this opportunity." |
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Martha
Carey 
Laurie
Helzer 
Tova
Johnson
Michele
Sinunu
Jed
Stevenson 
Sarah
Willen