An upcoming event… When: Thursday, February 28, 2013, Where: 10:00 AM-1:00 PM Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
1957 E Street NW
The Elliott School of International Affairs
Washington, DC 20052
Open to the public; please RSVP here.
Light lunch will be served following the program.
Keynote address:
•Mona Lena Krook, Associate Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University “Electoral Quotas & Women’s Representation in Rwanda: Is More Women Enough?”
Panelists include:
•Jennie Burnet, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Louisville “Gender Quotas & Women’s Representation in Rwanda: Is More Women Enough?”
•Megan Doherty, Program Manager for Middle East and North Africa, National Democratic Institute “Women’s Political Participation in Libya: Quotas as a Key Strategy for States in Transition”
•Sara Mia Noguera, Chief of Studies and Projects Section, Department for Electoral Cooperation and Observation, Secretariat for Political Affairs, Organization of American States “Can Election Observation be a Tool to Promote Women’s Political Participation?: the OAS experience in the Americas”
•Susannah Wellford Shakow, Chair and Founder, Running Start “The Importance of Starting Early”
Machik is once again offering its Summer Enrichment Program (SEP). All volunteers must arrive on July 12th, and depart on August 10th. There will be a mandatory orientation for all volunteers on July 13, 14, and 15. Please read the application guidelines carefully before initiating your application. Application deadline is March 25, 2013.
The Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo is offering four-year postdoctoral research fellowships in the field of social anthropology. One scholarship is offered for Norwegian students. Applicants must hold a PhD or equivalent in social anthropology as well as must have good spoken and written command of a Scandinavian language and/or English.Application deadline is March 15, 2013.
The latest issue of Anthropology in Action includes the uses of tourism development projects in solving the problems of inter-communal violence, the politics of representation as well as understandings of audiences and media-based constructions of “‘the toured;” and the ways in which the state and capital intersect in the development of tourism policy. This journal is not open access.
ICSI is a common form of IVF in which sperm is injected directly into the egg. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.
In 1978, Brigitte Jordan published her foundational cross-cultural ethnography Birth in Four Cultures, declaring that childbirth “is everywhere socially marked and shaped” (Jordan 1993[1978]:3). This publication signaled the birth of reproduction as a focused field of anthropological inquiry. That same year, the world’s first “test tube baby” conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) was born, ushering in the age of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Over thirty years later, both biomedical reproductive technologies and anthropological attention to technological approaches to reproduction have increased substantially. Anthropologists are engaged in studying the intersections of technologies and reproduction because they are deeply connected, indeed, central, to many other aspects of human life, including gender, kinship and notions of the family, individual identity, religion, social inequality, globalization, and health care policy. Concerning ARTs, Rapp has stated that “there can be no more hallowed or classic ground on which anthropological interpretation reverentially and critically occurs” (2006:421).
Birth in Four Cultures by Brigitte Jordan
ARTs developed and spread rapidly, if not evenly, throughout the globe after the birth of the first baby conceived through IVF. An estimated 5 million babies have been born using ARTs since 1978, with an average 27% of treatment cycles resulting in the birth of a baby, the majority of these resulting from traditional IVF or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), in which fertilization is achieved by injecting a single sperm into the egg (ESHRE 2012). Assisted reproductive technologies created new opportunities to study biomedicine’s involvement in conception, and, indeed, medical anthropologists have answered Ginsburg and Rapp’s (1995) call to situate reproduction at the center of social analysis. The importance of ARTs to this effort is evidenced by the number of edited volumes produced in the last 15 years that are devoted either completely or in part to the study of these technologies (Birenbaum-Carmeli and Inhorn 2009; Browner and Sargent 2011; Culley et al. 2009; Dumit and Davis-Floyd 1998; Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Inhorn 2007a; Inhorn and van Balen 2002; Inhorn et al. 2009; Morgan and Michaels 1999).
The review that follows presents a survey of some of the most recent anthropological literature on reproductive technologies, focusing on those published in the last 5 years (2007 and forward). The review demonstrates the breadth of this field of research, which has produced important insights on such topics as infertility experiences, the commodification of reproductive bodies, the phenomenon of international reproductive travel, new kinship configurations, among others. However, the review reveals that this research area has also suffered from a narrowed field of focus resulting from certain gaps in the literature along racial, socioeconomic, geographic, and gender lines. These imbalances problematize our ability to document the varied uses and impacts of reproductive technologies at global and local levels. I discuss this problem after the review section and underscore some recent studies that point the way toward a more inclusive and complete field of reproduction-focused medical anthropology.
Marking the 20th anniversary of the Lavender Language Conference, the program will feature an array of special events celebrating two decades of scholarship and activism in LGBTQ languages and linguistics.
Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference at American University
Dates: Friday, February 15 through Sunday, February 17
Location: 6th Floor, Butler Pavilion, 4410 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC
To register, visit the American University website.
Western Carolina University in Collowhee, North Carolina, invites applications for a visiting assistant professor of sociocultural anthropology with a specialization in environmental anthropology, beginning August, 2013. Applicants should have a PhD in Anthropology (in hand by time of appointment) from an appropriately accredited institution. The successful candidate will have ethnographic experience and will be qualified to teach an upper-level course in environmental anthropology as well as other courses focused on their regional or topical interests. Application details are available here.
Welcome to the new quarterly electronic newsletter from the Society for Medical Anthropology: Second Opinion: News and Ideas. The first issue features details on a joint international conference with a thematic focus on “encounters and engagements” in Tarragona, Spain, recent awards and achievements of SMA members, and a new anthropology and medical health interest group.
Anthropology of Tourism is a network of tourism scholars seeking to formally establish itself as an Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. While this group is primarily for members of the AAA, others can join the network as “friends” of the Anthropology of Tourism.
An open access review in Pacific Affairs of Deborah McDowell Aoki’s book, Widows of Japan: An Anthropological Perspective, says that this “…comprehensive study of Japanese widows brings into focus the complex, ambiguous, often tragic history of the impact of spousal death on Japanese women. Her eight years of research from 1996 included 58 interviews with women from urban and rural areas. She states the themes in the introduction: ‘the fetishism of female bodies to protect and embody family honor, the historical role of state formation in creating family and kinship systems, and the integrative functions provided by women…’ ”
anthropologyworks 