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Archive for May, 2009

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Lende wins 2009 Ganey award

Posted by gregdowney on May 6, 2009

2009 Ganey F. Ganey award winner, Daniel Lende

2009 Ganey F. Ganey award winner, Daniel Lende

Daniel didn’t even mention this to me, but looking for a photo of him for a poster, I came across this press release: our leading contributor also managed to pick up the University of Notre Dame’s 2009 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award for his many contributions to community-based research at Notre Dame.

Although he’s done a number of community-based research projects and supported student research (some of which we’ve read about on this site), the press release of the award also singles out his innovative design of the course, ‘Researching Disease: Methods in Medical Anthropology.’ In this class, Daniel has teamed up with local organizations like Imani Unidad, African American Women in Touch, Notre Dame Office of Alcohol and Drug Education, and a support group for veterans suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in order to place students where they can do research of real consequence to the local community. As the press release describes:

The research has since enabled community organizations to improve the conditions in hospital waiting rooms, educate the public about PTSD and provide better services to women living with HIV/AIDS. Findings have been published electronically on Neuroanthropology.net, and one project was turned into a guide book, “Underneath It All: Humor in Breast Cancer,” which has been used by McKinney-Arnold and Memorial Hospital in South Bend.

If you want to know more, go to the Notre Dame Anthropology news page to check out the video link, or see some of the reports Daniel has posted from the research on Neuroanthropology.net, including a number of pieces by the students themselves.

When Pink Ribbons Are No Comfort: On Humor and Breast Cancer
More Than A Waiting Room
Forever at War: Veterans’ Everyday Battles with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Just a Place to Talk: Women and HIV/AIDS

Posted in Medical anthropology | 3 Comments »

Two Cultures Conference

Posted by dlende on May 4, 2009

two-cultures
This Saturday May 9th, The New York Academy of Sciences will host the conference The Two Cultures in the 21st Century. Co-sponsors include Science & the City, Science Communication Consortium, and ScienceDebate 2008.

The conference will pick up the debate initiated by C.P. Snow in 1959, that an inseparable gulf has opened between the sciences and the humanities and that we are the worse off because of that.

The main keynote speaker 50 years later is E.O Wilson, the evolutionary biologist and author of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (otherwise known as unification on science and evolution’s terms). To add substance to the conference, we have former congressman John Porter and Segway inventor Dean Kamen.

I’ve actually heard EO Wilson speak, it’s well-worth it. And there are plenty of other presenters that day, including Kenneth Miller, author of Finding Darwin’s God; Science Friday’s Ira Flatow, and science journalist Carl Zimmer. You can see the full list of invited speakers – definitely heavy weights in science and communication, which might be a better name for the conference. How to get science across to the public is one of the main concerns of most of them.

You can still register; the conference is being held at the New York Academy of Sciences in downtown Manhattan.

For those of you actually interested in CP Snow, Peter Dizikies had an illumating essay Our Two Cultures on Snow’s ideas and how they have stood the test of time back in March. And by coincidence, Stanley Fish just wrote God Talk in today’s Think Again, where he asks if belief in science is more irrational than belief in God, or more broadly, questioning our reliance on “science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation” for guidance on what to do.

Posted in Conferences | 2 Comments »

Cynthia Mahmood and Political Violence

Posted by dlende on May 1, 2009

Cynthia Mahmood is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and a great colleague of mine. She is also now a star on YouTube. Here Cynthia explains how she approaches understanding political violence as an anthropologist:

About six minutes in, Cynthia discusses the present case of Pakistan, and expounds further in a press release accompanying the video, U.S. must help calm nuclear-armed Pakistan.

“Right now, we’re finally seeing that the heartland of the region’s instability, in fact, is in Pakistan, and that the problem President Obama is having to deal with is not just what to do about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but what to do about the very serious and urgent danger that a nuclear-armed nation is on the verge of either collapse or takeover by radical Islamists.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Ethnography, Politics, Violence | Leave a Comment »

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