Dear MAYS Community,
It is with great pleasure that we welcome Francesca Cancelliere, Of the University of Lisbon to the post of MAYS Coordinator!
Starting later this summer, Francesca will be taking over from Lilian Kennedy, and co-coordinating with Ursula Probst. She will carry on the fantastic work that previous MAYS coordinators have done by continuing to bring MAYS members together, and create spaces in which we can support each others’ research and medical anthropological goals.
Francesca’s application for the position highlighted her goals for the next MAYS conference – the 10 year anniversary Meeting! Her statement can be found below.
Francesca’s Application Text:
Dear MAYS members,
My name is Francesca Cancelliere and I am currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisbon). My research concerns HIV positive children and adolescents in Maputo (Mozambique), and looks at how the politics of adherence to antiretroviral therapy shape their life. I am also part of the Integra project ‘Between biomedicine and local therapies: cross-views on Mental Health in Mozambique’, jointly led by the University of Lisbon, the University of Turin and the University of Maputo.
Since I became a MAYS member in 2016, I enjoyed the network’s richness and diversity. I do believe that sharing opinions and suggestions in a constructive and informal setting is one of the best opportunities young scholars have to improve their work. Moreover, I believe the opportunity of working in a network that involves different universities, to be extremely valuable in fostering young scholars’ engagement and collaboration, and this is particularly the case when the researchers come from different places and have experience in different kinds of fieldwork. I would like to foster the dialogue of medical anthropology with other disciplines and methodologies. For example, my previous experience as a psychologist working in a multidisciplinary team providing psychosocial support to refugees has boosted my interest in the ethno-psychiatric multidisciplinary approach. In this regard, I actively collaborated in the organization of conferences both in the University of Lisbon – ‘Resistance and Empire: new approaches and comparisons, International Conference’ – and in the University of Maputo – ‘Integra: Between biomedicine and local therapies: cross-views on Mental Health in Mozambique’.
For the 10-year anniversary I will keep expanding MAYS’s network by especially focusing on supporting the participation of young scholars from Southern and Eastern Europe, since this has been weak in the pasts years. I also think that it would be important to open up our work beyond the academia and become more publicly engaged. Anthropology and social science in general tend to be underestimated and are deemed marginal disciplines. We need to show how, as researchers in social science, we can be active and engaged in the society. For this purpose, it will be extremely valuable for MAYS members to show the works presented at the 10th conference outside the University, by means of proposing informal meetings with the civil society.
My proposal is for the next MAYS meeting, to be held for the first time in Turin, Italy, country which represent the brutality of EU migration politics. These politics as the “immigrant-targeted security decree” in Italy, must turn the attention of the academic world into an active position. This opens up a larger debate about how medical anthropology can keep contributing to the understanding of complex social and political issues as well as engaging in the field according to multiple practices and approaches.
Congratulations again to FranCesca!
We look forward to benefitting from her vision and diligence in her new role!
All best,
Lilian and Ursula
Medical Anthropology Young Scholars 