I am a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. I am particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. My work follows therapeutic technologies as they move both from "bench to bedside" and from one cultural or institutional setting to another, examining how they intersect with the lives of practitioners and patients. Address: 5736 S. Woodlawn Ave. Room 203 Chicago, IL 60637
Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hope... more Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post-Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years.
""Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important ... more ""Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience. Based on ethnographic research conducted in sites from alcohol treatment clinics in Russia to Pentecostal addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, the essays are linked by the contributors' attention to the dynamics—including the cultural, scientific, legal, religious, personal, and social—that shape the meaning of "addiction" in particular settings. They examine how it is understood and experienced among professionals working in the criminal justice system of a rural West Virginia community; Hispano residents of New Mexico's Espanola Valley, where the rate of heroin overdose is among the highest in the United States; homeless women participating in an outpatient addiction therapy program in the Midwest; machine-gaming addicts in Las Vegas, and many others. The collection's editors suggest "addiction trajectories" as a useful rubric for analyzing the changing meanings of addiction across time, place, institutions, and individual lives. Pursuing three primary trajectories, the contributors show how addiction comes into being as an object of knowledge, a site of therapeutic intervention, and a source of subjective experience.
Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow Schüll""
The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society, 2018
In this chapter, we consider the models of suicide risk emerging from environmental epigenetics r... more In this chapter, we consider the models of suicide risk emerging from environmental epigenetics research at the McGill Group for Suicide Studies. We argue that this research represents an emergent style of reasoning in which a range of contextual and environmental factors are both molecularized and located in the brain. We also argue that implicit in this research is a notion of a “suicidal brain”: a brain that responds to adverse life experiences with an increase in risk of suicidal behaviour. In examining both this concept and its attendant styles of reasoning, we highlight some of the issues which research in environmental epigenetics raises for the study of suicide, as well as for the social sciences more broadly.
Over the past decades, the formerly socialist countries of East Central Europe and Eurasia have e... more Over the past decades, the formerly socialist countries of East Central Europe and Eurasia have experienced a range of transformations which bear directly upon the domains of mental health, psychiatry, and psychology. In particular, the disciplines and professions concerned with the human mind, brain, and behavior (“the psy-ences”) were strongly affected by sociopolitical changes spanning the state-socialist and postsocialist periods. These disciplines’ relationship to the state, their modes of knowledge production, and the epistemic order and subjectivities they contributed to have all undergone dramatic ruptures. In this essay, we trace the literature on these issues across three thematic domains: (a) history and memory; (b) the reform of psychiatry in an era of global mental health; and (c) therapy and self-fashioning. We argue for a closer articulation between the social science and historical literature on socialism and its “posts” and the literature among anthropologists, soci...
This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are ... more This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are focused on addiction as an object of knowledge and intervention, and as grounds for self-identification, sociality, and action. Highlighting the production of disease categories, the staging of therapeutic interventions, and the ongoing work of governance, this work examines addiction as a key site for the analysis of contemporary life. It likewise showcases a general movement toward accounts of addiction that foreground complexity, contingency, and multiplicity.
This volume provides a critical examination of ‘‘addiction’’—a relatively new but increasingly pr... more This volume provides a critical examination of ‘‘addiction’’—a relatively new but increasingly prominent way of thinking about and intervening into the contemporary human experience. Rooted largely in Western ideas about health, illness, and comportment, addiction is now experientially, discursively, and geographically widespread. As it assumes the status of a ‘‘global form’’ (Collier and Ong 2005)—albeit a hotly contested one—it both shapes and is shaped by the contexts in which it takes hold and through which it passes. Addiction is particularly relevant as an object of anthropological inquiry because it sits at the crossroads of some of the issues that most define the world today: the role of scientific—and particularly bioscientific—knowledge in the shaping of identity, selfhood, and subjectivity; the mutual transformation of novel medical technologies and the cultural settings in which they are enacted; and the mediation of biological and psychological systems and social and po...
Преобладающими методами лечения алкоголизма в России являются методы, основанные на применении вн... more Преобладающими методами лечения алкоголизма в России являются методы, основанные на применении внушения, разработанные наркологией, подразделом российской психиатрии, которая занимается проблемами наркотической и алкогольной зависимости. Особенно распространенным методом является применение дисульфирама, антагониста алкоголя, который наркологи часто заменяют нейтральными веществами. Основываясь на сборе данных, который осуществлялся в течение 14 месяцев в наркологических клиниках Санкт-Петербурга, настоящая статья исследует гносеологические и институциональные условия, способствующие практике «терапии плацебо». Приводятся доводы в пользу того, что широкое использование наркологами таких методов терапии сформировалось под влиянием клинического стиля мышления, специфического для советской и постсоветской психиатрии; мышления, которое само является продуктом советской идеологии в области знаний о психике и мозге и правомерность которого вызывает сомнения. Такой стиль мышления способств...
ABSTRACT The rapidly growing and contested area of biological research known as “environmental ep... more ABSTRACT The rapidly growing and contested area of biological research known as “environmental epigenetics” studies the potential effects of environmental conditions on gene expression through a set of molecular mechanisms. Hailed by some social scientists as a paradigmatic overturning of received wisdoms about evolution, heredity, and as a sign of an emergent domain of biosocial research, environmental epigenetics has also been met with scepticism by those who see environment and social contexts – as well as potential interventions – being reduced to the scale of molecular mechanisms. In this paper, we explore these issues in light of our ethnographic work in as part of a multidisciplinary group of researchers studying suicidal behaviour. We argue that while a distinct “style of reasoning” emerging from this work does indeed molecularize a range of environmental factors and locate them in the brain, this reflects a "pragmatic reductionism" on the part of the scientists themselves rather than a commitment to a narrow view of suicide. As such, more complex understandings of suicide risk – integrating ever more interdisciplinary researchers – remain possible limited not by interest but by technique, raw materials, and novel research practices.
Globally, breast cancer is the most frequent malignancy in women, and stage at diagnosis is a key... more Globally, breast cancer is the most frequent malignancy in women, and stage at diagnosis is a key determinant of outcome. In low- to middle-income countries, including Nigeria, advanced stage diagnosis and delayed treatment represent a significant problem. That social barriers contribute to delay has been noted in previous research; however, few specific factors have been studied. Using semi-structured interviews, this study identifies social barriers to diagnosis and treatment for patients who presented at University College Hospital Ibadan, Nigeria. Transcripts from the interviews were coded and analysed thematically. Thirty-one patients and five physicians were interviewed. The median age of patients was 51 (range: 28 to above 80), 83% were Christian and 17% were Muslim. Preliminary analysis showed that delays in diagnosis reflected a lack of education as well as the utilisation of non-physician medical services such as pharmacists. Delays in treatment were often due to fear of unanticipated surgery and cost. The majority of women did not know the cause of their breast cancer, but some believed it was caused by a spiritual affliction. This study suggests that further education and awareness of breast cancer for both patients and providers is needed in order to increase early stage diagnosis.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a &am... more Recent years have seen the emergence of a 'global mental health' agenda, focused on providing evidence-based interventions for mental illnesses in low- and middle-income countries. Anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists have engaged in vigorous debates about the appropriateness of this agenda. In this article, we reflect on these debates, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the management of substance use disorders in China, Russia, and the United States. We argue that the logic of 'treatment gaps,' which guides much research and intervention under the rubric of global mental health, partially obscures the complex assemblages of institutions, therapeutics, knowledges, and actors framing and managing addiction (as well as other mental health issues) in any particular setting.
Being There THE FIELDWORK ENCOUNTER AND THE MAKING OF TRUTH Edited by John Borneman Abdellah Ha... more Being There THE FIELDWORK ENCOUNTER AND THE MAKING OF TRUTH Edited by John Borneman Abdellah Hammoudi UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London 200 SENDERS references Gaaz, Berthold. 1989." Fremdenlandische Namensform und deutsches Person-alstatut: Zur Namensfiihrung der Aussiedler." Das Standesamt 6 (7): 165. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Sym-bolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. New York: Berg. Schwab, Sigfried ...
Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hope... more Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post-Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years.
""Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important ... more ""Bringing anthropological perspectives to bear on addiction, the contributors to this important collection highlight the contingency of addiction as a category of human knowledge and experience. Based on ethnographic research conducted in sites from alcohol treatment clinics in Russia to Pentecostal addiction ministries in Puerto Rico, the essays are linked by the contributors' attention to the dynamics—including the cultural, scientific, legal, religious, personal, and social—that shape the meaning of "addiction" in particular settings. They examine how it is understood and experienced among professionals working in the criminal justice system of a rural West Virginia community; Hispano residents of New Mexico's Espanola Valley, where the rate of heroin overdose is among the highest in the United States; homeless women participating in an outpatient addiction therapy program in the Midwest; machine-gaming addicts in Las Vegas, and many others. The collection's editors suggest "addiction trajectories" as a useful rubric for analyzing the changing meanings of addiction across time, place, institutions, and individual lives. Pursuing three primary trajectories, the contributors show how addiction comes into being as an object of knowledge, a site of therapeutic intervention, and a source of subjective experience.
Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow Schüll""
The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society, 2018
In this chapter, we consider the models of suicide risk emerging from environmental epigenetics r... more In this chapter, we consider the models of suicide risk emerging from environmental epigenetics research at the McGill Group for Suicide Studies. We argue that this research represents an emergent style of reasoning in which a range of contextual and environmental factors are both molecularized and located in the brain. We also argue that implicit in this research is a notion of a “suicidal brain”: a brain that responds to adverse life experiences with an increase in risk of suicidal behaviour. In examining both this concept and its attendant styles of reasoning, we highlight some of the issues which research in environmental epigenetics raises for the study of suicide, as well as for the social sciences more broadly.
Over the past decades, the formerly socialist countries of East Central Europe and Eurasia have e... more Over the past decades, the formerly socialist countries of East Central Europe and Eurasia have experienced a range of transformations which bear directly upon the domains of mental health, psychiatry, and psychology. In particular, the disciplines and professions concerned with the human mind, brain, and behavior (“the psy-ences”) were strongly affected by sociopolitical changes spanning the state-socialist and postsocialist periods. These disciplines’ relationship to the state, their modes of knowledge production, and the epistemic order and subjectivities they contributed to have all undergone dramatic ruptures. In this essay, we trace the literature on these issues across three thematic domains: (a) history and memory; (b) the reform of psychiatry in an era of global mental health; and (c) therapy and self-fashioning. We argue for a closer articulation between the social science and historical literature on socialism and its “posts” and the literature among anthropologists, soci...
This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are ... more This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are focused on addiction as an object of knowledge and intervention, and as grounds for self-identification, sociality, and action. Highlighting the production of disease categories, the staging of therapeutic interventions, and the ongoing work of governance, this work examines addiction as a key site for the analysis of contemporary life. It likewise showcases a general movement toward accounts of addiction that foreground complexity, contingency, and multiplicity.
This volume provides a critical examination of ‘‘addiction’’—a relatively new but increasingly pr... more This volume provides a critical examination of ‘‘addiction’’—a relatively new but increasingly prominent way of thinking about and intervening into the contemporary human experience. Rooted largely in Western ideas about health, illness, and comportment, addiction is now experientially, discursively, and geographically widespread. As it assumes the status of a ‘‘global form’’ (Collier and Ong 2005)—albeit a hotly contested one—it both shapes and is shaped by the contexts in which it takes hold and through which it passes. Addiction is particularly relevant as an object of anthropological inquiry because it sits at the crossroads of some of the issues that most define the world today: the role of scientific—and particularly bioscientific—knowledge in the shaping of identity, selfhood, and subjectivity; the mutual transformation of novel medical technologies and the cultural settings in which they are enacted; and the mediation of biological and psychological systems and social and po...
Преобладающими методами лечения алкоголизма в России являются методы, основанные на применении вн... more Преобладающими методами лечения алкоголизма в России являются методы, основанные на применении внушения, разработанные наркологией, подразделом российской психиатрии, которая занимается проблемами наркотической и алкогольной зависимости. Особенно распространенным методом является применение дисульфирама, антагониста алкоголя, который наркологи часто заменяют нейтральными веществами. Основываясь на сборе данных, который осуществлялся в течение 14 месяцев в наркологических клиниках Санкт-Петербурга, настоящая статья исследует гносеологические и институциональные условия, способствующие практике «терапии плацебо». Приводятся доводы в пользу того, что широкое использование наркологами таких методов терапии сформировалось под влиянием клинического стиля мышления, специфического для советской и постсоветской психиатрии; мышления, которое само является продуктом советской идеологии в области знаний о психике и мозге и правомерность которого вызывает сомнения. Такой стиль мышления способств...
ABSTRACT The rapidly growing and contested area of biological research known as “environmental ep... more ABSTRACT The rapidly growing and contested area of biological research known as “environmental epigenetics” studies the potential effects of environmental conditions on gene expression through a set of molecular mechanisms. Hailed by some social scientists as a paradigmatic overturning of received wisdoms about evolution, heredity, and as a sign of an emergent domain of biosocial research, environmental epigenetics has also been met with scepticism by those who see environment and social contexts – as well as potential interventions – being reduced to the scale of molecular mechanisms. In this paper, we explore these issues in light of our ethnographic work in as part of a multidisciplinary group of researchers studying suicidal behaviour. We argue that while a distinct “style of reasoning” emerging from this work does indeed molecularize a range of environmental factors and locate them in the brain, this reflects a "pragmatic reductionism" on the part of the scientists themselves rather than a commitment to a narrow view of suicide. As such, more complex understandings of suicide risk – integrating ever more interdisciplinary researchers – remain possible limited not by interest but by technique, raw materials, and novel research practices.
Globally, breast cancer is the most frequent malignancy in women, and stage at diagnosis is a key... more Globally, breast cancer is the most frequent malignancy in women, and stage at diagnosis is a key determinant of outcome. In low- to middle-income countries, including Nigeria, advanced stage diagnosis and delayed treatment represent a significant problem. That social barriers contribute to delay has been noted in previous research; however, few specific factors have been studied. Using semi-structured interviews, this study identifies social barriers to diagnosis and treatment for patients who presented at University College Hospital Ibadan, Nigeria. Transcripts from the interviews were coded and analysed thematically. Thirty-one patients and five physicians were interviewed. The median age of patients was 51 (range: 28 to above 80), 83% were Christian and 17% were Muslim. Preliminary analysis showed that delays in diagnosis reflected a lack of education as well as the utilisation of non-physician medical services such as pharmacists. Delays in treatment were often due to fear of unanticipated surgery and cost. The majority of women did not know the cause of their breast cancer, but some believed it was caused by a spiritual affliction. This study suggests that further education and awareness of breast cancer for both patients and providers is needed in order to increase early stage diagnosis.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a &am... more Recent years have seen the emergence of a 'global mental health' agenda, focused on providing evidence-based interventions for mental illnesses in low- and middle-income countries. Anthropologists and cultural psychiatrists have engaged in vigorous debates about the appropriateness of this agenda. In this article, we reflect on these debates, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the management of substance use disorders in China, Russia, and the United States. We argue that the logic of 'treatment gaps,' which guides much research and intervention under the rubric of global mental health, partially obscures the complex assemblages of institutions, therapeutics, knowledges, and actors framing and managing addiction (as well as other mental health issues) in any particular setting.
Being There THE FIELDWORK ENCOUNTER AND THE MAKING OF TRUTH Edited by John Borneman Abdellah Ha... more Being There THE FIELDWORK ENCOUNTER AND THE MAKING OF TRUTH Edited by John Borneman Abdellah Hammoudi UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London 200 SENDERS references Gaaz, Berthold. 1989." Fremdenlandische Namensform und deutsches Person-alstatut: Zur Namensfiihrung der Aussiedler." Das Standesamt 6 (7): 165. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Sym-bolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. New York: Berg. Schwab, Sigfried ...
Drawing on two ethnographic examples from a laboratory study of a group con- ducting environmenta... more Drawing on two ethnographic examples from a laboratory study of a group con- ducting environmental epigenetics research on suicide risk, we examine the ways in which researchers go about making credible claims in the face of a range of profound uncertainties. We first explore how a range of factors led to what is now accepted as a fact or discovery being explained away, several years ago, as a combination of technical error and known background noise. To set this first example within a broader context, we turn to a debate that erupted in the lab during a journal club meeting about claims-making and publishing in science. Through these examples, we aim to demonstrate the complex terrain in which scientists manage epistemic uncertainties and produce credibility in environmental epigenetics research. Our goal is to trace uncertainties from the unknowable reasons and internal states that lead people to respond to data in a particular way, through to the technical difficulties in identifying data from noise, through to issues of ethical self-making, as students learn to become certain types of scientists. We argue that the ways in which uncertainty takes on meaning, has effects and is managed also has much to do with its situatedness.
Theories about technology and its relationship to society and self are everywhere, even if we don... more Theories about technology and its relationship to society and self are everywhere, even if we don't always recognize them or articulate them. For example, technology is frequently seen as a primary driver of historical change or as a source of thorny ethical and social challenges. New technologies perennially attract both optimism and hope as well as pessimism and critique. In other cases, we might think of technology as objects or artefacts which have no inherent social, ethical, or political meaning but can be put to various uses or ends. In this course, we will draw upon the anthropology and history of technology, as well as science and technology studies, to critically examine these and other theories about technology, society, and self. During the first part of the course, we will examine a range of theories and frameworks and ask a series of conceptual questions: What assumptions are built into various theories of "technology"? What is the relationship between technology and science? Can material objects make people do things? In the second part of the course, we'll examine a range of technologies which impinge upon, shape, or otherwise interact with “selves”: social media, data-tracking devices, teletherapy, psychopharmaceuticals, and biomedical technologies at the end of life.
While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as brain disease, ... more While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as brain disease, there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?
While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as “brain disease,... more While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as “brain disease,” there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the
course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from
mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?
This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology. Draw... more This course introduces students to the central concepts and methods of medical anthropology. Drawing on a number of classic and contemporary texts, we will consider both the specificity of local medical cultures and the processes which increasingly link these systems of knowledge and practice. We will study the social and political economic shaping of illness and suffering and will examine medical and healing systems – including biomedicine – as social institutions and as sources of epistemological authority. Topics covered will include the problem of belief; local theories of disease causation and healing efficacy; the placebo effect and contextual healing; theories of embodiment; medicalization; structural violence; modernity and the distribution of risk; the meanings and effects of new medical technologies; and global health.
While anthropology and other social sciences have long explored the social and cultural shaping o... more While anthropology and other social sciences have long explored the social and cultural shaping of the self and personhood, many scholars have recently employed the rubric of “subjectivity” to articulate the links between collective phenomena and the subjective lives of individuals. This graduate seminar will examine “subjectivity”—and related concepts—focusing on topics where such ideas have been particularly fruitful: illness, pathology and suffering. Throughout the course we will critically examine the terms “self,” “personhood” and “subjectivity”—and their relationship to one another. Each week we will discuss a mix of conceptual and ethnographic readings which draw on some common analytical frameworks and categories, including narrative theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, biopower and science and technology studies.
This course examines the intersection between two areas of research that have recently experience... more This course examines the intersection between two areas of research that have recently experienced a resurgence in anthropology: (1) new ethnographic work on states and state- like institutions and (2) the literature on subjective experiences of remembering, trauma and suffering. In other words, this course covers different ways in which the relationships between persons and states in crisis have been conceptualized in recent anthropological work. We begin by examining the literature on social memory and history, then move to discuss trauma and political violence, and conclude with several weeks focusing on issues of sovereignty, citizenship and suffering. While we will read material drawn from a number of settings, a substantial portion of the readings will focus on Russia and post-Soviet Eurasia.
Funded by CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research), 2019
Background & importance: Drawing on a unique, long-term engagement with a team of researchers at ... more Background & importance: Drawing on a unique, long-term engagement with a team of researchers at the McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS), we will examine how notions of vulnerability to neurobiological risk are produced in clinical spaces, laboratories, and in cohort research, that is, at the articulation of multiple conceptual models, distinct populations, and data sets. MGSS research suggests that early abuse has durable and tangible effects on a person’s brain. While their research agendas focus on suicide as the end point of a pathological trajectory, they are more broadly interested in the neural profiles considered to predict a life of bad decision-making, mental illness, and other negative traits associated with personal loss, adversity, and psychological and emotional difficulties. The MGSS is exceptional in the nesting of multiple research agendas at one site, from clinical, to neuroanatomical, to epigenetic. The MGSS is a part of a burgeoning set of research programmes in neuroscience and epigenetics that aim to identify how specific life “exposures” (material and social) lead to a range of health outcomes and subjective experiences, behaviours, and risks. In Canada and globally, considerable research funds, including CIHR funding priorities, are oriented to neuroscience, developmental, and cohort studies of mental illness similar to those at the MGSS, that aim to understand the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Yet there are significant conceptual and empirical disjunctions within and between these fields. The MGSS will be studied as an exemplar of an emerging, and increasingly influential, research paradigm. Goals: In this project we ask how narratives of vulnerability to neurobiological risk are constructed at the MGSS. We will examine notions of “vulnerability” at three articulations: (1) of lab and clinical contexts, (2) of epigenetics and neuroanatomical studies, and (3) of prospective cohort studies and retrospectively produced models of neuropsychiatric risk. We will unpack hierarchies, intersections, and disjunctions of the knowledge formations as they are mobilized at these articulations to study their influence on narratives of the lives of people at risk of suicide. Methods: To engage with these epistemic articulations, we draw on a set of methods that are informed by conceptual framings from STS, social sciences & humanities, and biosocial theory. We take a critical and reflexive approach: our recruitment techniques are systematic, yet our research process is self-consciously flexible to capitalize on the creative potential of interactions of the empirical and conceptual. We combine lab and clinical ethnography with interviewing methods to yield different kinds of data (e.g. narrativesabout how epigenetic research is conducted as well as observationsof how the research is conducted in practice), with the aim of producing granular, robust empirical insights. Expected outcomes: Analysis of these models of risk and vulnerability has the potential to throw fresh light on our current understanding of the lives and deaths of the 3900 people who commit suicide in Canada each year as well as the “(un)healthy life trajectories” considered to lead to suicide. This project will offer a clarifying role of the specificity and multiplicity of understandings of psychiatric conditions and suffering in the 21st century, at the crossroads of neurosciences, mental ill-health, and health care.
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Books by Eugene Raikhel
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100940440
Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow Schüll""
Papers by Eugene Raikhel
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100940440
Contributors. Nancy D. Campbell, E. Summerson Carr, Angela Garcia, William Garriott, Helena Hansen, Anne M. Lovell, Emily Martin, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, A. Jamie Saris, Natasha Dow Schüll""
course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from
mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?
The MGSS is a part of a burgeoning set of research programmes in neuroscience and epigenetics that aim to identify how specific life “exposures” (material and social) lead to a range of health outcomes and subjective experiences, behaviours, and risks. In Canada and globally, considerable research funds, including CIHR funding priorities, are oriented to neuroscience, developmental, and cohort studies of mental illness similar to those at the MGSS, that aim to understand the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Yet there are significant conceptual and empirical disjunctions within and between these fields. The MGSS will be studied as an exemplar of an emerging, and increasingly influential, research paradigm.
Goals: In this project we ask how narratives of vulnerability to neurobiological risk are constructed at the MGSS. We will examine notions of “vulnerability” at three articulations: (1) of lab and clinical contexts, (2) of epigenetics and neuroanatomical studies, and (3) of prospective cohort studies and retrospectively produced models of neuropsychiatric risk. We will unpack hierarchies, intersections, and disjunctions of the knowledge formations as they are mobilized at these articulations to study their influence on narratives of the lives of people at risk of suicide.
Methods: To engage with these epistemic articulations, we draw on a set of methods that are informed by conceptual framings from STS, social sciences & humanities, and biosocial theory. We take a critical and reflexive approach: our recruitment techniques are systematic, yet our research process is self-consciously flexible to capitalize on the creative potential of interactions of the empirical and conceptual. We combine lab and clinical ethnography with interviewing methods to yield different kinds of data (e.g. narrativesabout how epigenetic research is conducted as well as observationsof how the research is conducted in practice), with the aim of producing granular, robust empirical insights.
Expected outcomes: Analysis of these models of risk and vulnerability has the potential to throw fresh light on our current understanding of the lives and deaths of the 3900 people who commit suicide in Canada each year as well as the “(un)healthy life trajectories” considered to lead to suicide. This project will offer a clarifying role of the specificity and multiplicity of understandings of psychiatric conditions and suffering in the 21st century, at the crossroads of neurosciences, mental ill-health, and health care.