Honkasalo, Marja-Liisa (2009). Grips and ties: Agency, uncertainty and the problem of suffering.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 23(1), 51-69. doi

For more about Prof. Honkasalo and her work, visit her page at Linköping University.

Horton, S., & Barker, J. C. (2010). Stigmatized biologies: Examining the cumulative effects of oral health disparities for Mexican American farmworker children Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 24(2), 199–219.

The Polgar Prize is given annually to the article deemed to be the best paper published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly in the most recent volume year. So expect good things! For a bit more context, see the press releases issued by the authors’ institutions, CU-Denver and UCSF.

Journal club will meet, as usual, on Friday at 11:45 a.m. – 12:35 p.m. in the Medical Anthropology Lab (TUR B103).

Biehl, J., & Moran-Thomas, A. (2009). Symptom: Subjectivities, Social Ills, Technologies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 38(1), 267–288. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-091908-164420

Join us on Friday at 11:45 a.m. in the Med Anthro Lab (TUR B103).

Adams, E., McCann, L., Armes, J., Richardson, A., Stark, D., Watson, E., & Hubbard, G. (2010). The experiences, needs and concerns of younger women with breast cancer: a meta-ethnography. Psycho-Oncology, 20(8), 851–861. doi:10.1002/pon.1792

Please join us Friday at 11:45 a.m. in the Med Anthro Lab (TUR B103).

Giele, J. Z. (2008). Homemaker or career woman: Life course factors and racial influences among middle class Americans. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 39(3):392-411

Donovan-Kicken, E., & Caughlin, J. P. (2011). Breast cancer patients’ topic avoidance and psychological distress: The mediating role of coping. Journal of Health Psychology, 16(4), 596–606. doi:10.1177/1359105310383605

Please join us in the (newly redecorated) Med Anthro Lab (TUR B103) on Friday at 11:45a. Even if you’re not interested in the discussion, you’ll want to see what we’ve done with the place.

Adams, V., Kaufman, S. R., van Hattum, T., & Moody, S. (2011). Aging Disaster: Mortality, Vulnerability, and Long-Term Recovery among Katrina Survivors. Medical Anthropology, 30(3), 247–270. doi:10.1080/01459740.2011.560777

Please join us on Friday at 11:45 a.m. in the Medical Anthropology Lab (B103).

Medical anthropology journal club with Visiting Eddy Professor Ted Green, Spring 2011

Tomorrow we ring in a new academic year of the medical anthropology journal club. New years of any sort are an opportunity to clear the air, so I thought it might be time to address a question that lots of people have asked me since our first meeting in 2007: Why is it called journal club?

The short answer is that I didn’t make it up.

Journal clubs are an established institution in many other disciplines, with a history stretching back to the nineteenth century. According to Linzer (1987), the first documented journal club was established in 1875 at McGill University. The phrase “journal club” itself may date to a group of students who organized themselves into a reading group at St. Bartholemew’s Hospital in London during 1835-1854. The first journal club in the United States, according to Linzer, began at Johns Hopkins University in 1889 and soon proliferated into separate departmental journal clubs.

Today, journal clubs are a standard part of medical education (Alguire 1998), and they have spread to engineering and the natural sciences (Newswander & Borrego 2009). Many leading journals in medicine and the sciences, including Nature and JAMA, publish regular journal club features. There is also a surprisingly large literature about the effectiveness of the journal club format for adult learning and for creating communities of practice (e.g., Akhund & Masood Kadir 2006, Ebbert et al. 2001, Lee et al. 2005).

This tried-and-true model is what inspired the medical anthropology journal club at UF beginning in Fall 2007. Many cultural anthropologists wrinkle their nose at the name (Really? A club?), but keeping the name acknowledges its roots. At any rate, journal clubs in anthropology may be here to stay: our department now has three of them on the course schedule!

Don’t worry, though: we won’t elect officers or hold a bake sale.

Kostick, K. M., Schensul, S. L., Singh, R., Pelto, P., & Saggurti, N. (2011). A methodology for building culture and gender norms into intervention: An example from Mumbai, India. Social Science & Medicine, 72(10), 1630–1638. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.03.029

We’ll meet, as usual, on Friday at 11:45 a.m. in the Medical Anthropology Lab (TUR B103).

Now’s the time to submit articles you’d like to discuss this semester. Please send me a PDF and the date you’d prefer to lead the discussion.

Rosenthal, L., & Lobel, M. (2011). Explaining racial disparities in adverse birth outcomes: Unique sources of stress for Black American women Social Science & Medicine, 72(6), 977-983.