This section is intended to be a place where students seeking research guidance and   scholars seeking advice on their papers may find assistance.

Members willing to volunteer as mentors please send a brief bio and research abstract to branl168@newschool.edu.

Mentors:

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. She can be contacted at mjdbasile@gmail.com.

James W. Green is a recently retired anthropologist, having taught for many years at the University of Washington in Seattle. Currently he is 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 — aiming for a training protocol for physicians since little is available on the topic. In addition, he regularly presents 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. His 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.

Anna Eleonora Kubiak is the cultural anthropologist, associate professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the lecturer of Visual anthropology and sociology: the method, the document and the subject of empirical research – in the Graduate School for Social Research. She is the author of books: Delicacy and the Left Krishna’s Hand (IFiS, Warsaw 1997), NEW AGE After All (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, euthanasia 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 writing the book on this topic. Web and e-mail address: http://www.ifispan.pl/members/akubiakifispan-waw-pl/akubiak@ifispan.waw.pl.
Expertise: euthanasia, physician aid in dying, biopolitics, bioethics.

Margaret Souza is Professor Emerita at SUNY/Empire State College. Her medical anthropology research focuses on the process of dying in the US and the various ways in which different the participants understand and respond to the process. She also conducts research about individuals living with chronic (often considered terminal) diagnoses as well as bereavement as a social process. She also holds a MSW from Wayne State University. She publishes in this area and is available to practitioners for support in their work and research as well. She can be contacted at Margaret.Souza@ESC.EDU.