Past
Fellows of CHCS Program
2007-2008 Fellows
Matthew Bersagel Braley
My foray into global health may be accurately described as “late, but on time.” As a fifth-year doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religion, my course of study had prepared me to work with the analytical and evaluative tools of Christian social ethics. I employed those tools primarily to gain insight into the political, economic, and social processes of globalization. The concerns of global health are, of course, enmeshed in these processes in ways alternatively tragic and hopeful, though always complex. As my preliminary dissertation underscored, the HIV pandemic and the religious response to it reflect both the tragic and hopeful, and in so doing surface fundamental questions about the ideals and practices that animate human life together. Clarifying disagreement about the answers—indeed, the very framing of the questions—related to how we live well together are constitutive of the field of social ethics as I understand it.
My year at CHCS, then, offered an opportunity to listen in on the questions global health practitioners are asking at the quarter-century mark of the HIV pandemic. The questions, even more than the answers, revealed something of the moral logic behind contentious, and policy-relevant debates about treatment versus prevention, the efficacy (and ethics) of vaccine trials, the balance and authority of quantitative and qualitative evidence, etc. In all of these discussions I was self-conscious of my disciplinary reflex to step back and reflect, even as my colleagues stepped up: to solve problems, propose coherent, evidence-based policies, and to argue for a creative, perseverant, and passionate pragmatism in public health. Such a pragmatism seeks, as African American theologians exhort, to “make a way out of no way” by reconciling the reality of resource scarcity with the abundance of troubling epidemiological data and personal stories of human suffering.
The opportunity not just to observe this in my peers, but to engage it—to practice it in small group discussions, policy papers, in-between classes, and over lunches at the Center—has revitalized a dimension to my dissertation (and my approach to scholarship in general) that had been quiescent: scholarship for social change. This commitment must be negotiated with care—often for good reasons—on this side [the Graduate Division of Religion] of the bridge. At Rollins, however, the ethos of social change and service, the—dare, I say—faith that another world is not just possible, but probable with the aid of well-trained global health professionals, is widely assumed and explicitly nurtured.
Neither approach, I came to appreciate, is without its dangers. An overly critical and detached study of religious ethics can be paralyzing, undermining the very contribution the discipline aims to make in clarifying moral disagreements and guiding future real-world action. At the same time, the vision of another world and the specific means to achieve it, at least in terms of global health theories and practices, can lead to a dogmatism and certitude more often associated in the popular imagination with religious zealots than public health practitioners. The paradigm shifts in global health, and the pendulum swing of policies in which those shifts have manifest themselves during the past half century (e.g., from the vertically-integrated, disease-specific focus of the WHO in the 1950s to the community-based primary health care of the 1970s or the controversies around HIV prevention and treatment strategies) offer a compelling argument for acknowledging the wisdom of the precautionary principle in all of our inquiries. And, as the Center’s directors would be quick to point out, the study of global health history plays no small part in helping us to understand the value of distinguishing practical wisdom (or phronesis) from the accumulation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
All of this is to say that my time as a CHCS fellow has added depth to my dissertation research in at least two ways. The first, not surprisingly, is my capacity to engage with a greater degree of sophistication both the empirical and moral debates that constitute global health policies and practices. The second, however, was unexpected. Debates within global health provided more than an arena for applying Christian ethical insights; they drove me back into my own discipline to understand how, for example, attempts to reconcile twin commitments to individual rights and the common good in public health might inform (and transform) enduring Christian discussions about the relationship between loving one’s neighbor and doing justice. In the end, though, the real value of my CHCS fellowship will be observable less in the immediate impact on my dissertation research and more in my ongoing commitment to a scholarship for social change that demands crossing and re-crossing the figurative and literal bridge between my own disciplinary home and that of global health. The collegiality of my CHCS peers gives me confidence that I will not make those crossings alone, and for that I am grateful.
Kristina L. Grabbe
Comming Soon......
Kristin Harper
Comming Soon...
Aukje Kluge
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Mona Pravin Patel
When I began the Masters of Public Health program at Emory, I assumed public health policy decisions were made altruistically and that health policies were created in the best interests of the general public. I was also under the impression that these policies were made in the pursuit of a healthier population and to allow the public greater access to healthcare. I was wrong. I learned that the majority of political decisions which affect and shape domestic and global care policy are made according to the self-interest theory, as opposed to the public interest theory, and rely heavily on constituencies and self-interest groups.
I was first exposed to domestic health policy and healthcare within my first semester in my Health Policy class, and began to learn more about U.S. food policy and foreign aid in respect to developing countries within my position with the Food Resource Coordination Team at CARE. In addition, my summer internship with the United States Agency for International Development in Rwanda allowed me to observe, first hand, the influence of politics and U.S. policy on the implementation of food aid programs.
For centuries food aid has been used as a resource to alleviate hunger, an underlying cause of poverty. However, developing nations are moving further away from diminishing hunger and from economic self-sufficiency due to this outside intervention. The problem is that food aid may lead to lower producer prices within the developing nation, which reduces incentives for local farm production, and may create a growing dependency on food aid. The typical image of food aid is the illustration of food hand outs being dropped via airplane into other countries by humanitarian organizations. Seemingly altruistic, underlying reasons have driven the in-kind transfer of food from wealthier nations to poorer countries. Food aid is an amalgamation of commercial food trade, political activity, and humanitarianism all encompassed within the concern of alleviating hunger.
The Center for Health Culture and Society (CHCS) Fellowship allowed me to research and take multi-disciplinary coursework to understand the complex nature of food aid and development. I decided to take classes in Political Science, Anthropology, and African Studies to learn more about the intersection of politics, economics, and development. The CHCS fellowship provided me the opportunity to study public works programs, development, and sustainability. One of the most valuable courses included a Politics, Governance, and Development Course in the Anthropology Department, in which I researched and did a cross-comparison and evaluation of Food For Work Programs in Ethiopia and India. Other coursework included courses on food and nutrition, sustainability, and economic development in Africa.
The semester in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was challenging, but extremely rewarding. The majority of my classes included students from multiple disciplines, and allowed me to see different perspectives on issues. This past year has pushed me to question and self-analyze my own thinking and has forced me to continue asking the question, “why”. I am extremely thankful to have been selected as a CHCS fellow—the class discussions, CHCS lectures, and other fellows have provided me remarkable insight and allowed me to develop and grow academically.
Lesley Jo Weaver
I came to the medical anthropology PhD program at Emory with an interest in stigma, disease, and suffering in underserved populations of developing countries, and I knew from the start that I wanted to incorporate public health into my training. As a CHCS fellow in Global Health, I have gained training that I would not have been exposed to anywhere else. The biostatistics that I’ve learned, for instance, have helped me incorporate quantitative measures into my previously qualitative methods, and I plan to draw upon the research design and field health assessment tools I’ve learned through public health in developing my dissertation project. Equally importantly for someone like myself who is interested in applied research, public health school has taught me to understand and speak to the concerns of health policy makers, a skill that I anticipate using in the future as I work toward the goal of influencing policy decisions with culturally-informed research.
One of the things I enjoyed most about my year of study in public health was the number of experienced practitioners to whom I was exposed. Unlike seminar courses in the graduate school, many global health courses are based around guest lectures from various individuals who are currently working in the field. I also appreciated our regular fellowship meetings, which gave the fellows an opportunity to get together, share ideas about our research, and talk about the challenges of being cross-disciplinary students. The insights of public health practitioners and my fellow students about the joys and the challenges of public health simultaneously disabused me of my assumptions that it would be easy to blend public health and medical anthropology, and reaffirmed my conviction that doing so could produce a very powerful combination of theories and methods for affecting meaningful change in the health status of underserved populations.
As I see it, both medical anthropology and public health have much to gain from each other, and may be missing out on important nuances in each other’s absence. And although they fit together logically in my mind, maintenance of a balance between health-improving interventions and the traditional anthropological ideal of non-modifying participant observation can be a real challenge. Spending a year at the Rollins School of Public Health has given me many insights into the strengths and weaknesses of both fields of study, and has invigorated my process of thinking in concrete, methods-based terms about how I will achieve this balance in my own future work.
Lydia Ogden, Senior Fellow
Comming Soon...