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| Interdisciplinary Fellowship Program |
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Past
Fellows of CHCS Program |
Cindy Ma (Epidemiology) and Heather King (International Health) completed a year in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Nicola Dawkins (Sociology) and Gayatri Reddy (Anthropology) completed a year at Rollins School of Public. During the fall semester, in addition to their course work, the fellows participated in the Mellon / Sawyer seminar series. |
Cindy Ma “As a CSHCS fellow, I enjoyed a year’s worth of coursework in medical anthropology, South Asian women and religion, feminist theory, and international human rights. I found the experience both challenging and stimulating. This year I learned many different ways of integrating the social sciences with public health. I explored issues of childbirth in the context of Hindu and Muslim cultures; I learned how human rights discourse can be incorporated into public health; in medical anthropology, I learned about different levels of analysis and their applications in public health. Best of all, I had many opportunities to pursue and develop my interests in women’s issues and women’s health. From the cross-disciplinary training, I have gained a fluency that allows me to work well in collaborative settings, as such in public health. From this fellowship, I have taken with me many new skills to add to my background in epidemiology as well as achieved great personal fulfillment in my graduate training." I want to express sincere gratitude to the Center for
awarding me this fellowship and allowing me the opportunity to take
a year’s worth of public health classes. I have grown tremendously
as a scholar and person, and I look forward to applying the lessons
I have learned in my future work.”
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 Heather
King “As a student in International Health with an undergraduate background in cultural anthropology, I feel very strongly about considering cultural factors in public health programs. After two semesters of coursework in the School of Public Health, I felt that cultural and broader social issues were being given mere lip service, if any attention at all, in the public health problems that we studied. I was surprised and dismayed by this dearth of shared knowledge, and wanted to find a way to bridge the rich ethnographic information and theoretical perspectives provided by cultural and social anthropology and the pragmatic methodology of public health. The Center for the Study of Health, Culture, and Society (CSHCS) fellowship provided me with the opportunity to explore medical and sociocultural anthropology and has enabled me to approach public health with a broader, enriched perspective. My master’s thesis will focus on the integration of anthropology and public health, specifically the use of anthropological methods to investigate complex public health issues, to develop and evaluate public health interventions, and to critically analyze broader social factors in disease and health. The experience I have gained from this year of coursework in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will prove invaluable as public health practice continues its trend towards interdisciplinary work, and as the social sciences continue to inform public health programs. "
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 Gayatri
Reddy “This past year at the CSHCS has been extremely rewarding for me. I came to the Center from the doctoral program in anthropology, having just completed two years of dissertation fieldwork in India, focussing on the male same-sex subculture in the city of Hyderabad. During the course of my fieldwork, I found that several of the participants of this subculture - or kothis as they referred to themselves - engaged in frequent high-risk behaviors without sufficient knowledge of their consequences. And yet, they had not been approached by any government health provider or NGO, had never had any exposure to educational health programs, and for the most part, did not have the resources to access medical facilities. For the most part, this lack of communication on the part of public health professionals was due to ignorance about this sexual universe, providing a very real argument for effective interdisciplinary dialogue between social scientists and public health practitioners. Especially in the context of high seroprevalence rates of HIV and STI’s, such a dialogue is not only desirable, but absolutely essential. The CSHCS Fellowship provided a valuable opportunity for me to gain such interdisciplinary training, complementing my anthropological knowledge with training in public health. It provided the opportunity to acquire conceptual and methodological tools, the vocabulary of public health, and an awareness of policy issues in the health arena - all vital for a meaningful dialogue between anthropologists and public health professionals. More personally, course-work and interactions with public health professionals over this past year were instrumental in facilitating my postdoctoral goal: to use my anthropological training to provide accessible and relevant ethnographic information that would maximally impact public health policies on STD’s and HIV/AIDS in India. I sincerely thank all those who made this year an intellectually and socially rewarding experience for me."
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 Nicola
Dawkins "I came to the Center for the Study of Health, Culture, and Society as a doctoral student in sociology. Planning to write my dissertation in the area of intimate partner violence, I entered excitedly anticipating the insight I would gain into the public health perspective on this and other problems of violence. I was not disappointed. On the contrary, my expectations were far surpassed through my exposure to other areas of public health-particularly those touched upon in the department of behavioral sciences and health education—that have so richly enhanced my graduate experience. As a student of sociology, I met the public health program equipped with a good bit of theoretical and statistical training. I could not help but feel, however, that I had received little opportunity to apply those theoretical analytic skills to practical, real-world situations. The public health program delivered that opportunity. From lessons in assessing the needs of a community to determining how to help communities organize, practical application seemed always the central focus of my courses. It was a change of pace as well to be exposed to theory courses where lessons were immediately made applicable to existing health problems or possible solutions. As a result of my immersion in this public health culture, the tools with which I can meet social health challenges like intimate partner violence have been dramatically fortified. I feel better equipped to handle both theoretical and practical concerns of the issue, which should allow for more fluid movement in the future between academic and applied settings. My time with the CSHCS was indeed well-spent; I have been made more well-rounded. I look eagerly toward my dissertation and beyond."
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