MAYS Elections!

To this purpose, we invite you to take a look at the short introductory notes of each candidate (see below) and cast your vote for ONE coordinator via e-mail. In order to vote, please send an e-mail with the subject “MAYS election” in which you indicate the name of your preferred candidate to mays.easa@gmail.com by the 9th of August 2016 – All votes will be treated confidentially.

The EASA Medical Anthropology Network board confirmed that those MAYS members who will cast their vote for the new MAYS coordinators do NOT have to be EASA members! This simply means that all MAYS members have the right to vote. So please take the chance, vote, and contribute to keeping our network running!

Kind regards,
Natashe and Mari

Dear MAYS members,

My name is Lilian Kennedy, and I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. I am also a member of the Students of Medical Anthropology (SoMA) group within the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA). I am very interested in becoming a coordinator for MAYS – both to help keep the internal running of the group’s logistics going smoothly, and create a sense of community and active discussion between MAYS members. Recently, SoMA sucessfully organised a workshop entitled “Who cares: A Symposium on Care in Medical Anthropology” which was especially helpful in creating a platform for us PhD students to be able to present our research and get feedback from the wider academic community (other Phd students, academics from other fields, and Medical Anthropology staff members from EdCMA.) As a coordinator for MAYS I would love to help broadcast these types of student-organised across the MAYS network and encourage collaboration. This would not only help all of us better disseminate the results of our efforts, but also create a way for us to share good strategies, tips, and advice on how to best organise and get funding for such events. Beyond this, it would be also be interesting to open up conversations about MAYS members becoming visiting research student scholars at other institutions with Medical Anthropology programs/MAYS members. Expanding this type of networking would create unique opportunities for cross-institution and real-life MAYS collaboration, and provide a chance for us to experience and learn from a range of Med Anthro communities. In short, as a MAYS coordinator, I would work to expand the range and scope of the many interesting ideas and projects from our community, as well as opportunities for us to network, collaborate, and meet.

Dear MAYS-members,

My name is Mandy Geise, I’m a 2nd-year PhD Student at the Center for Research in Medicine, Science, Health, Mental health, and Society (Cermes3) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. My research, which is anchored in a larger global health research project, is concerned with the conception, discourses and practices of medical genetics and genomics in Mexico.

Having studied in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires before Paris, I enjoy the connecting function of a network like MAYS; it enables us to learn from and about other young scholars from different backgrounds and to share useful information easily.

As a MAYS coordinator, I hope to contribute to an increasingly connected network by building on the excellent work done by the previous MAYS coordinators. I would maintain the website and mailing list to stimulate exchanges on research, writing, and events, as well as being a liaison between the EASA and its younger MAYS peers. I look especially forward to organizing a conference as fun and inspiring as this year’s conference in Lisbon. Finally, I aim to give the website an extra spark.

As a lover of films, documentaries, and photography, I hope to introduce a new section on the website that makes use of different sorts of visual material: images, reels, stories members bring from their research, but also fragments or pieces that inspire us and make us (re)consider what we come across in our research, or the way we tell ethnographic stories.

As a coordinator I hope to help make MAYS grow, to get to know many of you and the projects you’re working on, and to make talking, thinking, and writing about our research (even) more fun!