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Dear EdCMA Community,

Hello from a (finally) sunny Edinburgh!

The arrival of warmth and light in the city has been very welcome, and it’s a lovely moment to pause and reflect on what has been a full and lively year for the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology.

At the heart of this year has been our wonderful MSc cohort. They continue to bring such energy, insight, generosity, and intellectual imagination to EdCMA. It has been a real pleasure to learn with and from them in our classrooms & beyond, and we are excited to see the dissertation projects now taking shape across such a wide & vibrant range of topics.

!TODAY!: The EdCMA Annual Lecture, with Dr Orkideh Behrouzan, SOAS

Today we are especially delighted to be hosting our Annual Lecture with Dr. Orkideh Behrouzan, who will be speaking on “The Social Body, Chronic Violence, and the Right to an Ordinary Life: Lessons from Iran”. 

This promises to be a powerful and very timely lecture, and we are honoured to welcome Dr. Behrouzan to Edinburgh. Her work has been central to conversations across medical anthropology, psychiatry, trauma, memory, and the politics of everyday life, and we are very much looking forward to gathering as a community for this important event. Please feel free to join us today at 2:30pm at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.  

A busy semester of talks, workshops, and conversations: 

This semester has also brought a rich programme of speakers and events. We were delighted to welcome Kevin O’Neill from the University of Toronto, who shared his new work with us and generously led a publishing workshop for early career researchers. We also hosted Alex Nading, who joined us to discuss his newest book and to help us think through urgent questions at the intersections of medical anthropology & planetary health. 

Our active student group, Students of Medical Anthropology (SOMA), has also been at the centre of this year’s energy. SOMA hosted a fantastic workshop bringing together students of medical anthropology from across the United Kingdom for research presentations, collaborative and creative methods sessions, and a brilliant discussion led by our own Dr. Marlee Tichenor on anthropology and digital life. It was a wonderful example of the kind of student-led initiative, creative intellectual exchange, and community-building that makes EdCMA such a dynamic place to study.

PeopleFest comes to Edinburgh: 

This weekend, we are also excited to be part of the ASA's PeopleFest Edinburgh. Designed to celebrate anthropology and bring new audiences to our work, PeopleFest will bring anthropology to the city’s streets, venues, and communities across a jam-packed weekend. There are many health-related events taking place that you won’t want to miss, and we are delighted to see medical anthropology playing such a visible role in this wider celebration of public engagement and community conversation. We hope to see many of you there.

New work from the EdCMA community: 

We are also very pleased to share recent publications and contributions from members of our community.

Meredith Evans has a new article in Feminist Anthropology, “Making care audible: Musical gifts and affective reciprocity in the clinic”.

Alice Street has co-authored a new piece in The Lancet, “Can plastic waste from point-of-care diagnostics be reduced?”

And Stefan Ecks is featured in the new edited volume, Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century.

Together, these pieces speak to the breadth and vitality of work being done across EdCMA, from care, sound, and reciprocity in clinical spaces, to the environmental implications of diagnostic technologies, to the future directions of medical anthropology as a field.

Stay connected: 

As we move into the summer months, there is still much happening across EdCMA: MSc dissertation projects are gathering momentum, colleagues are writing and presenting new work, and our community continues to grow through talks, workshops, festivals, and conversations both within and beyond the university.

As always, we would love to hear from you. If you have news to share, an event to publicise, a publication to celebrate, or simply want to connect with the EdCMA community, please do get in touch.

Thank you for being part of EdCMA, and for making it such a generous & intellectually vibrant community.

Warmly,

Laurie

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Laurie Denyer Willis: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/go-with-god/paper
Director, Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology: https://www.edcma.sps.ed.ac.uk/

University of Edinburgh 

HOW TO SIGN UP TO OUR EdCMA MAILING LIST (I’m not going to lie, there are a few steps): 

If you wish to subscribe to our mailing list, please send an email to sympa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk

Do not put anything in the Subject Line of the email.

In the message body put the following information: 

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(If you experience any issues with the subscription process or just want to be added manually, please email James.Gilmour@ed.ac.uk or me at Laurie.deneyrwillis@ed.ac.uk )