Category: Announcements

As Anthony Rizks is soon stepping down as MAYS co-coordinator after being on the post for two years, it is time to elect the next MAYS coordinator!

This year, we have two candidates:
– Diana Antonia Jeflea,
– Chandini Shyam.

Each of the candidates provided us with information about their interests, experience, and goals for MAYS.  Please read through the information they provided below and then please submit your vote for who you would like to be the next MAYS coordinator (a two-year term) and the person who will take the lead in planning the next MAYS Meeting.

The election will close on 10 November 2021, midnight.

Diana Antonia Jeflea

Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Department of Cultural Sciences

Short synopsis of your research interests and project

My main research interests are migration, risk situation communication, medical crises’ management, civic activism, and biopower and biopolitics. I have already undergone theses and researches in these fields, some of the most recent ones focusing on women’s seasonal migration during the COVID-19 pandemic, truck drivers as transnational migrants during the pandemic, and discourses in social media regarding the SARS-CoV-2 situation. Moreover, I am highly focused on the social aspect of this medical event that we are encountering in society itself and in smaller groups of people. Nevertheless, I seek to understand the impact states have in fighting against the spreading of the virus and their intrusion into people’s lives.

Experiences that speak to your eligibility for the role

First, I have coordination experience which recommends me for this position. I have done five years of volunteering in Romania, for Hospice of Hope, which provided me with various insides in many aspects of the administrative field, such as fundraising, events coordination or projects coordination and management. Secondly, I deeply think that being the group coordinator during my Master’s Degree let me understand better the modalities in which people with similar interests can be gathered together and engaged in meaningful debates.

What are your plans for MAYS?

I am willing to create a space in which members of the international academic community can break boundaries and find new and exciting aspects of other social and cultural spaces. I think that being a highly creative person could help to organize stimulating events for people who are seeking to create information. How? By making sure everyone fits in the puzzle and brings his own piece to it, making sure its growth never stops. Moreover, I cannot wait to be able to organize an offline event again, but always keeping in mind that there are people who would like to participate and cannot do so due to various reasons. Hence, implementing a long-term hybrid form of conferences would be one of my first actions.

Chandni Shyam

Utrecht University/ MSc(research) Cultural Anthropology: Sociocultural Transformations

SHORT SYNOPSIS OF YOUR RESEARCH INTERESTS AND PROJECT

I have a long standing interest in medical anthropology, especially in narratives that are essential but overlooked. I have worked extensively on gender and mental healthcare as a Reserach Associate at IIT Madras. During this time, I also worked briefly on the unequal attention paid to affective labour of mental healthcare nurses in Indian hospitals. Right now, I am working on a second masters for which I have been doing fieldwork on Covid-19 vaccinations in Chennai and the ways in which information about the state and vaccines work towards compliance. I truly believe that healthcare has to be universally available and culturally sensitive. Furthermore, my own lived experience as a cancer survivor has helped expand my scopes of what medical anthropology can do.

EXPERIENCES THAT SPEAK TO YOUR ELIGIBILITY FOR THE ROLE

I have organised many events, both online and offline at numerous instances of my academic career. More importantly, I have always worked on creating and nurturing a community of learners. For example, I am a core team member of the Students for Cultural Anthropology Journal, which is a student initiative to foster peer review. My work with the journal stems from the belief that community is really important for thriving in academia. After all, whatever we write is on the back of many before us and for those with and after us. I also think that there is a lot of scope for collaborative and experimental learning in medical anthropology. My explorations in writing literary ethnography and quantitative ethnography have been fruitful in this regard but I really need a good community for learning and growing with.

WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR MAYS?

I would like to increase the social media presence of MAYS through reading groups and field discussions. It would also be interesting to have coffee talks online and offline that can give open up space for learning about new ethnographic explorations in medical anthropology.

VOTE HERE

We are happy to announce the 2021 MAYS Coordinator call!

Anthony Rizk’s tenure as MAYS coordinator is ending this October and, once again, it is time to vote in a new network coordinator to take his place and work alongside Magdalena Góralska!

Do you want to take an active role in connecting students and early career scholars with an interest in Medical Anthropology? Would you like to organise the next MAYS conference? Do you have ideas about how to expand and deepen the MAYS network? Would you like to expand your skills and contacts and become an organising member of EASA? Are you a postgraduate in a European university?

If you would like to apply please use the link below to send in your academic CV, along with short answers of not more than 200 words to each of the following prompts:

• Short synopsis of research interests and projects.
• Experiences that speak to your eligibility for the role.
• What would be your plans for the next meeting and for MAYS in general?

Application deadline: 20 October 2021

Application form

Thank you in advance for your interest and application! If you have any questions regarding the application and/or MAYS coordination, please do not hesitate to contact us at mays.easa@gmail.com.

All the best

Anthony and Magdalena

Register for the workshop HERE
Registration deadline: June 1st 2021
**deadline extended: June 20th 2021**

MAYS Discussion Workshop

We are announcing a call for participants for our fourth workshop in the MAYS Method Workshops Series – a workshop on Healthcare and the State that will take place on the 23^rd of August 2021 from 14:00 to 17:00 CET. The Workshops Series aims to provide spaces for learning, discussion, structured debate, knowledge-sharing and mutual support leading up to our next 12th Annual MAYS Annual Meeting in Warsaw in August.

Conveners:
Dr. Giuseppe Troccoli, University of Southampton, g.troccoli@soton.ac.uk
Dr. Letizia Bonanno, University of Kent, l.bonanno@kent.ac.uk

MAYS Discussion workshop: Healthcare and the State// August 23^rd 2021, 14:00-17:00 CET

Aligning with the ongoing discussion on care and the state, and departing from the idea of biomedicine as a crucial component to post-pandemic statecraft projects, this workshop wants to explore what contribution medical anthropology can give to our understanding of the relationship between the state and those who contest, comply and respond to its services and discourses. We invite original contributions focusing on empirical outcomes or exploring theoretical possibilities which revolve around public health measures, policies, discourses and their reception.

Inspired by instances of compliance, adjustments and active resistance as they emerged over the last year in response to public health measures, discourses and practices to contain the Covid-19 Pandemic, we are interested in exploring not only how these have been received, but also how they have magnified people’s pre-existing disenchantments and lack of trust in the state. We suggest that people’s distrust toward public health measures signals the very failure of the public health systems, hindered by (at least) a decade of disinvestment in public services, austerity measures and privatizations.

Crucially though, during the Covid-19 pandemic, state-promoted public health discourses have often leveraged on and appealed to individual responsibility while, at the same time, promoting an ethic of public utility, social responsibility and collective duty to care for each other. As a result, uncanny relations have been established between the public and the private, the collective and the personal. Although this tendency became all the more apparent during the current pandemic, appeals to individual responsibility as a mode of public health are not any new: in fact they represent the very core of neoliberal discourses on health and healthcare. These contrasting appeals, we contend, often disguise the progressive withdrawal of the state from matters of public health. However, such appeals as well as the biomedical and care practices they entice are rarely straightforward. In fact, they are often met with scepticism when not openly opposed and contested.

The workshop wants to push forward the discussion of compliance, conflicts, frictions, and resistances which emerge in response to state- promoted public health measures. We suggest that these grassroots, societal and contentious responses offer important margins to rethink the political salience of biomedicine and its entanglement with state power. Medical anthropology is indeed well positioned to explore these instances. The workshop welcomes reflections and critical analyses  that explore the reception of public discourses and practices of care, health and public health within and beyond Europe. We invite contributions focusing on the current Covid-19 public health issues. The workshop will bring together eight PhD and Early Career researchers working on such issues.  Attendants’ pre-circulated short papers (2500 words max) will be discussed during the workshop which will be moderated and chaired by Giuseppe Troccoli and Letizia Bonanno (conveners).

Guidelines and Format

The workshop will be open to PhD and Early Career researchers, based on ongoing or completed research. Participants will be asked to submit a title and abstract (250 words) for a proposed paper and a short bio (150 words). Eight abstracts will be selected according to their relevance to the proposed workshop theme. We aim at creating a balanced group of participants, in terms of career stage and research interests.

The selected participants will be asked to pre-circulate their full-length papers (2500 words maximum) by July 31^st 2021. Participants will be required to read each other’s work in advance so that the workshop will be entirely dedicated to discussing and sharing ideas, perspectives and critiques. The participants’ bios will be pre-circulated as well, together with their full-length papers. The biographical notes are intended to familiarize participants with each other’s broader scholarly interests and research.

The workshop intends to provide space for different perspectives to emerge while allowing each participant to discuss at length and to confidently share insights and ideas that might still be in the first stages of development. Our motivation to restrict the number of participants to 8 is informed by our will to foster fruitful and productive discussions.

Registration HERE

Date: August 23rd 2021, 14:00-17:00 CET

Register for the workshop HERE
Registration deadline: April 29th 2021

First MAYS Methods Workshop

We are announcing a call for participants for our first workshop in the MAYS Method Workshops Series – a workshop on affective teaching, that will take place on the 6th of July 2021. The Workshops Series aims to provide spaces for learning, discussion, structured debate, knowledge-sharing and mutual support leading up to our next 12th Annual MAYS Annual Meeting in Warsaw in August.

Conveners:
Alice-Amber Keegan, PhD Candidate, Associated Researcher, Durham University
Jordan Mullard, Post-doctortal Teaching Fellow, Durham University
Emily Tupper, PhD Candidate, Durham University
Lucy Johnson PhD Candidate, Durham University
Halima Athker, PhD Candidate, Durham University

MAYS Affective Teaching Workshop: Covid-19 and Me // July 6th, 2 pm – 5 pm GMT+1

Guidelines and Format

The workshop will take place on Zoom on the July 6th, 2 pm to 5 pm GMT+1. The maximum number of participants is 30, with enrolment on a first-come-first-served basis. Registration deadline is April 29th – to register go HERE (there is no confirmation of registration e-mail). The workshop participation is free of charge.

While workshop is open to all across social sciences, we encourage those who are interested in teaching anthropology/medical anthropology to apply. Applicants from the Global South are particularly welcomed to join.

In this workshop we will replicate the ‘COVID-19 and me’ exercise described in our paper, asking attendees to prepare a short (50 – 150 word) piece about their experiences of COVID-19 to be submitted prior to the workshop. The conveners will read through the entries prior to the workshop, anonymise them and shared with workshop attendees during the workshop.

Workshop Structure

Registered participants will be later given a submission link to provide their 50-150 word reflective pieces, that after being anonymised, will serve as a teaching material in working groups during the workshop.

During the workshop, we will ask attendees to read through the pieces in small groups (break-out rooms) and come up with some key themes that emerge. We will encourage the attendees to think about their emotional responses to what they are reading. How does it make them feel when considering the different experiences of peers? Attendees will be asked to draw a bubble diagram for each written piece outlining key emotions. They will rank which emotions had the biggest impact on their discussions. To avoid this slipping into voyeurism, we will encourage participants to consider which themes felt most poignant in relation to understanding the different ways in which the pandemic was experienced and what that tells us about concepts of health more broadly.

We will then come together as a group to share themes and discuss how medical anthropological theory can be applied to those themes. We will then outline how we used these methods in the COVID-19 and me exercise, discussing how we used affective learning to engage undergraduate students with medical anthropology. We will consolidate the exercise with the pedagogical theory of Freire and his ideas in ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and how those ideas can be applied to develop learner’s consciousness of the topic under study. We will work with attendees to think about how they can use affective learning to engage learners within their discipline or topic and come up with a ‘lesson plan’ that they could use in the future. We will conclude by asking attendees to write a short rationale for using affective learning and how they can evidence (or not) its value through their own experience of the exercise.

Given the deeply personal nature of the topic to be discussed and the potential for intense emotional responses we will endeavour to provide a ‘safe space’ for all attendees. Attendees will be required to sign up in advance and we will send out a secure zoom link to ensure that those who are not registered cannot attend the workshop unannounced. We will make it clear to all attendees that they should engage in discussions sensitively and respectfully and will allow participants to opt-out of any participation that they do not feel comfortable with.

Registration HERE
Deadline for Workshop Registration: April 29th, 2021
Notification of Acceptance: May 12th, 2021

Workshop Date: July 6th, 2021, 2 pm to 5 pm GMT+1