Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Medical Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Health

Secondary Theme: Inequality

(3-0065) Creative Eco-systems of Care in Global Context

This panel documents the value of ethnography in community and institutional settings of care. In doing so, it examines how formal and informal networks of care form under social and economic inequalities. Furthermore, it highlights the tensions that arise due to different understandings of what care is and how it should be practiced. Our panel seeks to elucidate the role anthropologists play as cultural brokers who help others resist, adapt, and/or bridge dissimilar perspectives and systems of care. We hope to highlight anthropology’s emerging role in public health and other applied social sciences.

Some of the questions our panel will grapple with include what counts as a system of care? How do individuals and groups navigate and construct systems of care? How is care provided when healthcare systems are fragmented, impoverished, or totally absent? How does the bureaucratic logic of institutional care complement or challenge local understandings of care, and how might one kind of logic fundamentally transform the other?

Organizer(s)

• Linh An

  Hunter College, CUNY

Presenter(s)

• Linh An

  Hunter College, CUNY

Chair(s)

• Kathryn Hale

  NRSA Postdoctoral Research Fellow
  University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

Presenter(s)

• Kathryn Hale

  NRSA Postdoctoral Research Fellow
  University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Sandra Polleys-Bunch

  Newly-minted Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology (unemployed)
  Binghamton University (State University of New York)

• Kenneth Maes

  Oregon State University

• Noelle Sullivan

  Assistant Professor of Instruction
  Northwestern University

Discussant(s)

• Narelle Warren

  Lecturer
  Monash University

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Chinese Family Caregivers and “Working” the Mental Health System
  Linh M. An – Hunter College, CUNY
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  Dependable yet not Dependent: The Culture of Private, Intergenerational Care in Sri Lanka
  Kathryn L. Hale – University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  Values that Promoted Inequalities in Access to Health Care on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts
  Sandra D. Polleys-Bunch – Binghamton University (State University of New York)
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Is High-quality, Empathic Care Incompatible with Financial Remuneration and Health System Integration? Divergent Perspectives from Ethiopia
  Kenneth C. Maes – Oregon State University
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  Troubling Ecosystems of Care: Health Professionals and Foreign Volunteers Navigate Conflicting Visions of Biomedical Capacity in Tanzania's Under-Resourced Health System
  Noelle Sullivan – Northwestern University
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  Discussion
  Narelle Warren – Monash University