Date:
Location:
“Critical Global Mental Health and the Hidden Lives of Rajasthani Women"
Attend this event via Zoom (advance registration required)
Speaker:
Aneel Brar, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Mata Jai Kaur.
Discussants:
David Gellner, Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
Alison Shaw, Professor of Social Anthropology, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
Mira Vale, Visiting PhD Student, Harvard Medical School; PhD Candidate in Sociology, University of Michigan.
Contact:
Sadeq Rahimi
Sadeq_Rahimi@hms.harvard.edu
This seminar is cosponsored by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
This event is online only. Please click the "Read More" link for full instructions on how to attend this seminar.
Remote Access Information:
To join by computer:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/93426549761
Please note: This event requires a password to attend. Please email Sadeq Rahimi (sadeq_rahimi@hms.harvard.edu) with a brief introduction of yourself to receive the meeting password.
To join by one tap mobile:
+13126266799,,93426549761# US (Chicago)
Please note: This meeting will be recorded.
Speaker Bios:
Aneel Singh Brar, MMSc, MA, PhD Candidate, is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Mata Jai Kaur (MJK), a maternal and child health non-profit located in a rural border region of Rajasthan, India. Aneel’s implementation and research work focuses on the health, wellbeing, and subjective experiences of the most vulnerable Rajasthani women. In addition to providing antenatal care and safe delivery services, in recent years Aneel has led the implementation of a lay counsellor-delivered perinatal mental health intervention in collaboration with Sangath and Grand Challenges Canada. Building on this work, Aneel has conducted formative research on the experiences and perceptions of Gender Based Violence in rural Rajasthan in collaboration with Prof. Vikram Patel and the HMS Center for Global Health Delivery. Aneel’s anthropological engagement with this implementation work forms the core of his PhD research which critically examines the discourse of global mental health from the perspective of lay counsellors, patients, and their families. Aneel is an alumnus of the Master of Medical Science in Global Health Delivery program at HMS (under the supervision of Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good) and is currently completing his PhD in Medical Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
David Gellner, PhD, is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. He was Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography from 2009-2012 and again from 2016-2018. His doctoral research (1982-4) was on the Vajrayana Buddhism of the Newars and on Newar social organization, in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. He has carried out fieldwork in Nepal on many subsequent occasions, broadening his interests to include politics and ethnicity, healers, mediums, and popular approaches to misfortune, religious change, activism of all sorts, democratization, elections, borderlands, Dalits, and class formation.
Alison Shaw, PhD, is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. First fieldwork in Pakistan and the UK in the early 1980s resulted in a pioneering study of British Pakistani practices of transnational kinship and marriage. She updated her original monograph with fieldwork conducted in the 1990s, published as Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani families in Britain (2000). She then conducted fieldwork with British Pakistani families with children with genetic problems: Negotiating Risk: British Pakistani experiences of genetics (2009) examines discrepancies between patients' and clinicians' understandings of genetic risk and inheritance in the context of referrals to medical genetics.
Mira Vale, PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan and a Visiting PhD Student at Harvard Medical School. Her current research looks at how research teams developing surveillance technology for psychiatric care resolve ethical questions. As a medical sociologist, Mira is broadly interested in how technological change affects healthcare delivery. In previous research, she has studied how clinicians’ electronic health record use influences clinician-patient relationships, how psychiatric patients develop trust inproviders, and how patients decide to use new reproductive health technology. Mira’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
