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| Interdisciplinary Fellowship Program |
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Past
Fellows of CHCS Program |
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| Linda Block “The
Fellowship with the Center for the Study of Health, Culture, and Society
has been a challenging and rewarding experience for me. After
spending two years in the School of Public Health focusing on pragmatic,
program-oriented work, the past year in the Graduate School was quite
a change. I went into the Fellowship intending to focus on media
and communications as a complement to my degree in International Health
and Health Education. This focus crossed various disciplines and
allowed me to take courses in different departments, including Film
Studies, Sociology, and the Institute for Liberal Arts. My courses
have dealt with theoretical and aesthetic issues that are seldom discussed
in public health. I have read texts and studied theories that
are not part of public health discourse. By looking at public
health issues through the lens of other disciplines, I have gained a
perspective on public health that would have been impossible had I not
ventured into other fields. Throughout the year, I attempted to maintain
a vision of how these alternate approaches to media and communications
could be applied to public health. Though this year was not without
its difficult moments, overall I feel that this Fellowship has been
an important and valuable part of my education. Now that I am
returning to public health to work, I am sure that I will continue to
look back on this experience as a positive one. "
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| Lynn Kawczynski “The CSHCS fellowship has tremendously expanded my knowledge of sociocultural aspects of public health interventions and policy through course work in anthropology, sociology and political science. I believe this knowledge will be indispensable when working with a community to help design practical, yet meaningful methods of health promotion. Furthermore, this experience has led me to question current approaches to health promotion and dominant ways of defining health and illness. I will hopefully begin to apply this knowledge while working on my master's thesis with a nutritional anthropologist in Guatemala. My thesis will investigate beliefs about pregnancy and nutrition in the context of adherence to iron supplementation for the prevention of anemia. In the future, I hope to continue in this tradition of interdisciplinary work which bridges academic theory with public health practice."
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| Chris Kuzawa “As a student of biological anthropology, my interests focus broadly on cross-cultural and evolutionary perspectives on human health and disease. More specifically, for my dissertation research I hope to explore the role of intrauterine growth retardation as a predisposing factor for the development of adult metabolic diseases like obesity and cardiovascular disease, which are currently rising epidemically in many poorer communities in developing nations. The Center Fellowship program has provided the opportunity to expand my training to epidemiology, which approaches health issues from a perspective distinct yet complimentary to my background in anthropology, and will provide the analytic tools necessary to conduct my dissertation research. Although a powerful framework for studying disease causation, epidemiology is by necessity a reductionistic science, and thus runs the risk of implifying or ignoring salient social and economic forces that underlie human health and disease, including its differential experience within and between social groups. The bi-weekly seminars sponsored by the Center have focused on the social dimension of disease experience, fostering the critical and self-reflexive eye required of any discipline with social reponsibilities and political implications as broad as public health. The balance struck by these perspectives has made for a truly unique intellectual experience."
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| Mark Padilla "I came to the CSHCS from the anthropology doctoral program at Emory, where I am preparing to conduct my dissertation fieldwork on HIV/AIDS in the Dominican Republic. My graduate coursework in the anthropology department and my interactions with medical anthropologists Peter Brown and Marcia Inhorn over the past few years, have convinced me of the importance of combining complex theories of human culture and behavior with a practical focus on pressing health problems. While it appears that many public health practitioners have begun to discuss the need for such a dialogue with the social sciences, it seems that few of them have extensive training in both public health/medicine and a social science. Similarly, relatively few medical anthropologists have received a professional degree in public health. I was attracted to the CSHCS because it provided an opportunity for me to be professionally qualified in both anthropology and public health, in order to use anthropological methods and theory to directly inform the design and implementation of more effective pblic health programs. In particular, I am committed to the use of an anthropological perspective for the creation of relevant, culturally sensitive HIV/AIDS prevention programs in specific local areas. The fellowship has allowed me to fill this interdisciplinary space, and has given me the conceptual tools to begin to understand both sides of the bridge."
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Their
reports follow: