MSTP Annual Research Conference

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Hansen, an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, earned an MD and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology as part of Yale University’s NIH funded Medical Scientist Training Program. She is a joint-appointed assistant professor of anthropology and psychiatry at New York University, and a research psychiatrist at the New York State Office of Mental Health’s Nathan Kline Institute. During graduate school she completed fieldwork in Havana on Cuban AIDS policy, in urban Connecticut on harm reduction and needle exchange, and in Puerto Rico on faith healing in evangelical Christian addiction ministries founded and run by self-identified ex-addicts. Her work has been published in both clinical and social science journals ranging from the Journal of the American Medical Association and Health Affairs to Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and Medical Anthropology. After graduate school, she completed a clinical residency in psychiatry at NYU Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital, during which she also undertook an ethnographic study of the introduction of new addiction pharmaceuticals. She examined the social and political implications of clinicians’ efforts to establish addiction as a biomedical, rather than moral or social condition, as well as the ways that neurochemical treatments may be reinscribing hierarchies of ethnicity and race. As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow, she began work on a feature length visual documentary based on this work, which is now in post-production. She is also leading a national movement for training of clinical practitioners to address social determinants of health, which she and co-leader RWJ Clinical Scholar Jonathan Metzl call “Structural Competency,” She is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Investigator Award, Kaiser Permanente Burche Minority Leadership Award, a NIDA K01 Award, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, and the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training Model Curriculum Award.

Dr. Holmes, an Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health’s Community Health and Human Development Division and the Graduate Program in Medical Anthropology.  He is Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UCSF and UC Berkeley and Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.  He is currently investigating social hierarchies, health, health care and the naturalization and normalization of difference and inequality in the context of transnational US-Mexico im/migration. This project led to the publication of the book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (California Series in Public Anthropology, University of California Press, 2013).  An article from this work was awarded the Rudolf Virchow Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology and the book received the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award, the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award, and the James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. In addition, Dr. Holmes received the 2014 Margaret Mead Award (the only award given jointly by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology) for “bringing anthropology to bear on wider social and cultural issues.”  In addition to academic articles and the book, Holmes has written about this research for Salon.com, Access Denied, and The Huffington Post and has been interviewed on multiple NPR, PRI, Pacifica Radio, and Radio Bilingue shows.  Concurrently, he is conducting research into the production of the clinical habitus, subjectivity, and gaze, in other words, the processes through which biomedical trainees learn to perceive and respond to social differences and inequalities. In addition, he is engaging in new research into representations of and responses to refugees in Europe; the social, symbolic, and political processes through which Latin youth in California navigate ethnicity, multi-layered citizenship, indigeneity, borders, and violence.  Along with other academics, clinicians, activists and artists in the Critical Social Medicine Working Group known as “Rad Med”, he is engaged in imagining and experimenting with alternatives to the current systems of health care and racialized policing in the U.S.