Megan Alexander
Osman Balkan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. He received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching interests include political identity, migration and citizenship, race and ethnicity, and necropolitics. Balkan’s first book manuscript, Dying Abroad, offers an ethnographic study of how ethno-religious minorities in Europe navigate and make sense of death and dying in countries that they do not necessarily view as their own. His second project examines the complex negotiations surrounding the burial and memorialization of terrorists and victims of political violence in Europe and the United States. His work has been published in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Contemporary French Civilization, the Journal of Intercultural Studies, and in edited volumes including The Democratic Arts of Mourning and Turkey’s Necropolitics.
Melissa Basile is a medical anthropologist currently working as a researcher in the area of implementation and dissemination science. Her research is focused on processes of deliberation and decision making for patients with advanced chronic lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis and COPD, and the ways in which individuals negotiate lay and biomedical knowledge systems in order to understand and make decisions about their treatments. Melissa has spent many years conducting participatory fieldwork among community based organizations in health care and development, and in using qualitative methodologies to gain insight into how patients understand disease and illness. She has written and presented on the social theory of embodiment, personhood, and the anthropology of education and is currently working on applying these bodies of theory to ethnographies of end-of-life care.
Marc-Antoine Berthod is trained as an anthropologist (PhD in 2003, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland), I taught at the Department of Sociology of the University of Geneva and at the University Institute Kurt Bösch in Sion, for the European Master in Palliative Care and Thanatology. For more than three years, I was later on director of the Research Institute of the Department of Health and Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland in Sion. During my career, I also had the opportunity to be a visiting scholar at the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a few years later at the Department of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, in New York as well. Since 2009, I am full professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO) in Lausanne. My research interests and main publications focus on death, dying and bereavement; migration and repatriation of bodies; assisted suicide; palliative care and ageing; rituals and community life within institutions. I am currently president of the Thanatological Society Western Switzerland. Website: www.mort-
Erica Borgstrom is a trained anthropologist with an interest in medical anthropology and dying studies. She is a lecturer in medical anthropology and end of life care at The Open University (OU) in the UK. Her research looks at how palliative and end of life care are practiced, often using ethnographic methods. Her PhD research examined ‘choice’ in relation to policy, and its translation into practice, as well as the experiences of those living with chronic and/or terminal illness. Outside of the OU, Erica is editor of Mortality – an international, interdisciplinary journal of death studies – and a council member for the Association for the Study of Death and Society. She has made film with BBC Ideas about planning for the end of life – https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/should-everyone-have-an-end-of-life-plan/p099x2yh
Mara Buchbinder, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC – Chapel Hill, as well as core faculty in the UNC Center for Bioethics. Buchbinder is a medical anthropologist with broad interests in cultures of health, illness, and medicine in the United States. Her recent work focuses on how patients, families, and healthcare providers navigate social and ethical challenges resulting from changes in medical technology, law, and health policy. She is the author of Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (with Stefan Timmermans, 2013, University of Chicago Press) and All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain (2015, University of California Press), the editor of Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: Bridging Perspectives for New Conversations (with Michele Rivkin-Fish and Rebecca Walker, 2016, UNC Press), and co-editor of the two volume series The Social Medicine Reader, 3rd edition, (2019, Duke University Press). Buchbinder’s current book project, Scripting Death: Agency and Control at the End of Life, is an ethnographic account of the implementation of Vermont’s medical aid-in-dying law.
Maija K. Butters (maija.butters@helsinki.fi) is a cultural anthropologist working in the doctoral program of History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She teaches on death cultures and rituals in various religious and cultural traditions, and her dissertation study is on contemporary death and dying in Finland. In this ethnographic study, she focuses on the various cultural means that terminally ill people employ in order to handle their mortality. She has written on the metaphysical meaning of aesthetic experiences in the face of death, and currently she is looking into rituals and ritualizations around dying patients in hospital and hospice surroundings. The dissertation also includes a critical discussion on contemporary care system and healthcare politics in Finland.
Maija is involved with hospice education, and she lectures on culturally and religiously sensitive patient care in hospitals and at medical conferences. Previously she has published on Buddhist art and Tibetan culture, and she has also written on the embodied experiences of becoming a mother. Various philosophical and anthropological themes, such as embodiment, rituals, aesthetics, suffering and joy, are close to her heart.
Kate Dean-Haidet, Ph.D., MSN recently received a doctorate in Comparative Studies from the Ohio State University. Her interdisciplinary research is an ethnography of grief and mourning conducted in multisite hospice and bereavement spaces. In this work, she relies on scholarship from comparative philosophy/religion, cultural anthropology, and narrative studies to interrogate particular ways that relationship between the living and the dead is imagined, narrated, somatically perceived, and ritually enacted by contemporary American mourners. She has presented her research nationally and internationally to diverse disciplinary audiences and hopes to publish this work soon. Previously, Kate taught university coursework in holistic nursing while working as a volunteer during the AIDS epidemic. This work galvanized her interest in questions of how to “die well.” In her holistic nursing practice, she employed the use of herbal medicine, energy therapies, dream work, yoga, meditation, and music. Kate currently works as an educator, consultant, and bereavement counselor at an Ohio hospice where she occasionally plays her Celtic harp. Her current interests include phenomenological approaches to studying affective dynamics in mourning; curiosity about what constitutes “spirituality” in end-of-life care; appropriation of Buddhist philosophy & practice in American culture; theories of personhood; and the rise of feminist ethics as counterpoint to justice and principle based ethics in palliative/hospice health care practice.
Natashe Lemos Dekker is a PhD candidate at the medical anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on social processes and the management of death and dying with dementia. She scrutinizes the notion of social death and critically assesses the politics of death and dying by questioning normative conditions for the production of lives worth living. Through ethnographic fieldwork in nursing homes in the Netherlands, she addresses how notions of a good death relate to end of life decision making and the provision of long term care for people with dementia. In doing so she explores anticipation of the end of life and experiences of grief and loss. Within this research project, and specific to the Dutch context, she addresses the challenges and motivations for euthanasia in the case of dementia, and implementations of the palliative care tool Zorgpad Stervensfase (a Dutch version of the Liverpool Care Pathway) in a nursing home setting. Previously, she has conducted field research in Buenos Aires, Argentina on bereavement and political action among women who have lost family members during the dictatorship. She holds an MA in gender and ethnicity studies and an MA in cultural anthropology, both from Utrecht University.
Nora Rose Downey received her Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2012. After graduation she took the opportunity to live in South Korea and learn Korean Taoist Meditation, Kouk Sun Do. It was an intensive immersion in an ancient practice that broadened her appreciation for the continuum between life and death.
A long-time hospice volunteer, Nora is very interested in differing practices for, and approaches to, end-of-life care. She is especially interested in the ways in which medical institutions facilitate meaning, dignity, and peace for dying patients and their families. Currently, Nora is in the process of applying to medical school and hopes to apply the perspective she gained from her various experiences, and the field of medical anthropology, to her practice specializing in palliative end-of-life care.
Annelieke Driessen is Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. A medical anthropologist by training, her research focuses on old age and at the and-the-life course, subjectivities, and care.
Annelieke is currently conducting a healthtalk study with patients who have been in Intensive Care with COVID19. She has previously worked as the ethnographer on the ESRC funded project ‘Forms of Care’, alongside Simon Cohn and Erica Borgstrom (see https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres-projects-groups/forms-of-care), which sought to elucidate the work that is ‘actively not-intervening’ in palliative care practice through interviews, participant observation and a small number of patient case studies. Annelieke obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam. In her thesis, she articulates practices in which good ways of living with dementia are crafted through the enactment of interesting subject positions for people with dementia in Dutch residential care. Annelieke.Driessen@lshtm.ac.uk
Assistant Professor Medical Anthropology at London School of Hygiene &Tropical Medicine
THIS Institute Research Fellow
Forms of care: project website and @Formsofcare
Twitter: @Annelie3ssen
Devin Flaherty, M.A. is a graduate student in psychological and medical anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently studies hospice care in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a context in which she pursues her research interests which include the imagination, phenomenology, fatal prognoses and death.
Barbara Gerke is a Medical and Social Anthropologist (M.Sc. Medical Anthropology and D.Phil. in Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford) who has been researching longevity and vitality practices in Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa) and Tibetan communities in India. In the course of this research she investigated concepts of the life-span and events of untimely deaths and how Tibetan and Himalayan communities approach sudden death events through divination and Buddhist rituals. Her monograph Long Lives and Untimely Deaths was published by Brill in 2012.
She currently is the Principal Investigator of a FWF-funded research project on potent substances in Sowa Rigpa and Buddhist rituals at the University of Vienna. While in Vienna, she completed a course for voluntary hospice workers in end-of-life care by the Austrian Buddhist Society and on occasion volunteers on a palliative care station in Vienna. She is interested to explore and develop future research projects in the fields of Buddhism, end-of-life care, and social practices surrounding death and dying.
Suzanna Goldblatt Clark is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural/medical anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her dissertation looks at end of life care in the context of neonatal intensive care units. Her research focuses on the impact of technoscientific possibility on medical culture and the inconstant criteria that are used to measure viability and mark vitality. The work looks at how decisions to withhold or withdraw aggressive curative treatment are shaped by the social relationships, cultural realms, macroeconomic forces and the material realities of the NICU. More broadly Suzanna is interested in ethical challenges in medicine, healthcare economics, technological-biological interfacing, personhood, suffering and narrative medicine.
Dr. Casey Golomski is a cultural and medical anthropologist working in sub-Saharan Africa. His research explores the interplay of medicine and religion in social reproduction across the life course. Topically, he is interested in healthcare and healing, aging, death and dying, the body, ritual and religion, and work, value and risk. In his professional service, he is an associate editor for the African Journal of AIDS Research and a board member for the Northeast Workshop on Southern Africa. Dr. Golomski has published in Material Religion, Anthropology Southern Africa, Social Dynamics, and American Ethnologist. He recently completed a book in review for publication on cultural change surrounding death, dying and funerals amid AIDS in Swaziland and is beginning new work on eldercare, race and dependency in South Africa. Golomski is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire and an associate of the Life Course, Obligation and Dependency research unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
James W. Green, Ph.D. I am a recently retired anthropologist, having taught for many years at the University of Washington in Seattle. Currently I am part of a hospital team investigating the practices and skills of interpreters in cases where families speak little or no English and English-speaking physicians deliver the unhappy news of brain death, a medical term inexplicable in some cultures. We are aiming for a training protocol for physicians since little is available on the topic. In addition, I regularly present to visiting international medical students on our state’s death with dignity law and associated medical issues. “Beyond the Good Death, the Anthropology of Modern Dying” was published in 2008, an outgrowth of my most popular course, the comparative study of death. A current writing project examines how the medical literature handles the terms “spiritual” and “spiritual care” with end of life patients, a topic rife with problems of conceptual clarity and one where medical anthropology might have something useful to say. When not dealing with these grim matters, I pursue my real interest, wine collecting.
Alessandro Gusman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Turin, Italy. His research focuses on the presence of Pentecostalism in Uganda; Congolese churches in Kampala, end-of-life care; spirituality and health; ethnographic methods. He is member of the Editorial Board of the journal “Studi Tanatologici” (Thanatological Studies) and author, in the field of dying and bereavement studies, of “Mourir chez soi. Le cas de la médicalisation du domicile en Italie”, Ethnologie française, 171, 2018; “La famille face à la maladie en phase terminale. Ethnographie dans une maison de soins palliatifs au Piémont (Italie)”, Anthropologie & Santé, 12, 2016; ) “Body, Culture and Place: Towards an Anthropology of the Cemetery” (with C. Vargas), in Rotar, M. e Teodorescu, A. (a cura di), Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe, Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Cori Hill Heymann is currently a senior undergraduate student at Eastern Oregon University studying anthropology and sociology. Her senior research includes an ethnographic study of the ‘Death Doula’ movement in the United States. Cori also works full time in the managed healthcare industry (17 years) and continues to observe how private healthcare plans are (or are not) underwritten to support end-of-life care, as well as how medical management programs may influence end-of-life treatment. She is a direct patient support volunteer for hospice and hosts the Winston-Salem Death Café in North Carolina, where she resides. Cori is also the webmaster for SMA’s Dying and Bereavement Special Interest Group.
Sadaf Noor E Islam
Donald Joralemon (djoralem@smith.edu) is Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. His B.A. is from Oberlin College (1974) and his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles (1983). Professor Joralemon has done fieldwork in Peru and in the United States. He has published widely on shamanism and, most recently, on medical ethics. He is the co-author (with Douglas Sharon) of Sorcery and Shamanism (1993) and author of Exploring Medical Anthropology (Fourth edition in preparation). His article, “Dying While Living: the Problem of Social Death,” appears in the edited collection Our Changing Journey to the End (C. Staudt and J. H. Ellens, Praeger, 2014). The journal Mortality recently published his article, “Ordering Chaos: The Process of Remembering Mass Murder” (2015). His new book, Mortal Dilemmas: The Troubled Landscape of Death in America (Left Coast Press) was recently published in January 2016.
Hadi Karsoho is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and social studies of medicine at McGill University. His doctoral thesis is centered on Carter v. Canada, the ongoing landmark court case that is shaping up to be the most significant legal challenge to Canada’s Criminal Code prohibitions on euthanasia and assisted suicide since Rodriguez v. British Columbia in 1993. By following the unfolding of the series of events and the diverse actors associated with the case, Hadi is able to investigate contemporary questions on death and dying that lie at the intersection of law, medicine, and ethics. Hadi considers himself an interdisciplinary scholar having received training in both quantitative and qualitative research methods and from multiple disciplines. Hadi holds a bachelor of arts degree in mass communications from University of California, Berkeley. From 2011-2013, he was a doctoral fellow in Health Care, Technology, and Place, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research strategic training initiative based at the University of Toronto. In 2014-2015, he holds a Wolfe graduate fellowship in scientific and technological literacy.
Ori Katz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His current research deals with (non-military) missing persons in Israel, revealing how narratives of “missingness” are constructed in conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty. This research is an extension of his interests in the cultural space between life and death. His previous research examined Posthumous Fertilization using frozen sperm in Israel. He serves as chair of the Junior Scholars Network of the Israeli Sociological Society.
Hiroaki “Hiro” Kawamura
Barbara A. Koenig, Ph.D., is Professor, Institute for Health & Aging, University of California, San Francisco. She is an anthropologist who works in the inter-disciplinary field of bioethics. She helped found the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University (and was on the faculty from 1993 through 2005); from 2005 to 2011 she created and led the Biomedical Ethics Research Program at Mayo Clinic.
Koenig pioneered the use of empirical methods in the study of ethical questions in science, medicine, and health. Her current focus is emerging genomic technologies, including: biobanking, return of research results to participants, the use of whole genome sequencing in newborn screening, and using deliberative democracy to engage communities about research governance. Dr. Koenig has been continuously funded by NIH since 1991. Currently, she co-directs a “Center of Excellence in ELSI Research” at UCSF, leads an NCI ROI on return of results in genomic biobanks, and directs the ELSI component of a U19 award focused on newborn screening in an era of whole genome analysis. She has been an active participant in federal policy, including the “Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing.” Her most recent book is Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age.
Veronika Koller is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University (UK). Her research interests ae in discourse analysis and metaphor, which she applies to health communication, corporate discourse, and langugae and sexuality. Her publications include Metaphor and Gender in Business Media Discourse (Palgrave 2004), Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere (co-edited with Ruth Wodak, de Gruyter 2008) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her most recent work addresses issues of metaphor, cancer and the end of life.
Anna E. Kubiak is the cultural anthropologist, associate professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a lecturer in Collegium Civitas in Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of books: Delicacy and the Left Krishna’s Hand (IFiS, Warsaw 1997), However NEW AGE (Santorski & Co, Warsaw 2005), Nostalgia and other longing (Stopka, Łomża 2007), OTHER DEATHS. Anthropology of dying and mourning in late modernity (Universitas, Warsaw 2014), Funerals are our lives (IFiS PAN, Warsaw 2015). Her research interests include death studies, bioethics and visual anthropology. After publishing her article on euthanasia and physician aid in dying titled: Assisted dying in the context of biopower (http://www.drustvo-antropologov.si/AN/2015_1_eng.html) she is planning the book on this topic. More: http://www.ifispan.pl/members/akubiakifispan-waw-pl/profile.
Andrea Lambell is a medical anthropology PhD student at Durham University in the UK. Her project, funded by the government’s Economic and Social Research Council, is investigating barriers to palliative care through a realist evaluation of the use of non-conventional therapies for people affected by life-limiting illness. Her Masters in Research Methods, completed at Durham University in 2019, presented ‘massage ethnography’, a novel method of participant observation aimed at facilitating ethical and equitable research in palliative care. Prior to attending Durham University, Andrea spent 14 years as a member of a multidisciplinary hospice clinical outreach team, providing massage and aromatherapy to people with life-limiting illness in a range of settings. During this time she completed a multidisciplinary health sciences BSc(Hons) with the Open University.
Betty Wolder Levin is a professor in the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College and is also affiliated with the Department of Public Health at the CUNY Graduate Center and the CUNY School of Public Health. She holds a PhD in Sociomedical Sciences with a specialization in Anthropology from