EDCMA

Blog content

Hello from a sunny autumn day in Edinburgh!

As the light turns golden over George Square, we’re easing into our academic year, grateful for the crisp air, the shifting leaves, and the familiar sense of renewal that comes each autumn. It’s been a wonderful year at the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology (EdCMA), and we’re excited for what’s to come in 2025/26.

We’ve just welcomed a new group of MSc students in Medical Anthropology, whose curiosity and energy have already filled our classrooms and corridors with lively conversation. We’re thrilled that Jessica Cooper is directing the Masters programme this year, bringing a thoughtful and creative vision to the months ahead. And our student group, SoMA (Students of Medical Anthropology), continue to make community-building look easy: organising writing groups, crafting circles, and health-related field trips that remind us how much learning happens beyond formal walls. Do follow their Instagram for updates and invitations. You can find all their details here. 

It’s been a season full of milestones at EdCMA…some that will make it into journals and headlines, and others that unfold quietly in everyday life:

Several of our colleagues have shared important new research: Alex Edmonds’s beautiful piece on vulnerability in American Ethnologist; Stefan Ecks’ exploration of the suppression of depression as multimediation in Myanmar in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; a collaborative commentary in The Lancet Global Health authored by Sumeet Jain and colleagues across the University of Edinburgh, entitled “No health without aid & development.”; and my own short film produced with the Feminist Cities CoLab. Though emerging from very different places, each traces how questions of care, justice, and belonging shape what it means to live a healthy life – and the fragile, political, and creative work that makes such living possible.

There are exciting projects taking shape too: Alice Street’s 'After the Single Use', a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award exploring the history, impact, and solutions to global healthcare waste and pollution, continues to grow; and we are thrilled that Dr. Meredith Evans has just been awarded a new Wellcome Trust Early Career Award, entitled “Madness in Medicine: Psychotic experiences and innovative approaches to mental health care in the UK”. These projects open new conversations about care, environment, and imagination (core, I think, to what we do here). 

But we also want to take a moment to celebrate the other kinds of successes that make our community what it is. This year, EdCMA welcomed new babies (and has another on the way). Colleagues ran marathons, wrote poems, adopted cats, moved flats, planted gardens, read novels that made them think differently, taught with care, cooked with love, and shared many a good meal and glass of something together. These might not make it into a CV, but they matter deeply. They are the quiet infrastructures of care that make our collective work possible. They remind us that being part of this community is not only about producing knowledge, it’s about making a life that sustains that knowledge. About showing up for one another, in the big and the small ways.

So here’s to both: to the awards and the articles, and also to the laughter in hallways, the potlucks, the moments of rest, and the small acts of generosity that carry us through the year.

And finally, looking ahead…our upcoming events! 

• Global Mental Health Half-Day Programme, Tuesday 21 October 2025, 2:00–5:00 pm, Violet Laidlaw Room, 6th Floor, Chrystal Macmillan Building & Online. Info here: https://www.edcma.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/event/autumn-2025-global-mental-health-day

Join us for an afternoon bringing together students, alumni, staff, and colleagues across disciplines to reflect on mental health research and practice around the world. Highlights include:

Keynote (2:10–3:10 pm): Dr Ursula Read (University of Essex): “Medicine and prayer – Can spiritual healers and mental health workers work together? An example from Ghana” (with excerpts from the film Nkabom: A little medicine, a little prayer)

Preceding this, the morning seminar entitled “Mental health & homelessness: sharing experiences from Ethiopia & Scotland” will open space for interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. 

• EdCMA Lunchtime Brown Bag Seminar, Wednesday 22 October 2025. Info here: https://www.edcma.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/event/precedented-times-thinking-african-health-histories-after-chainsaw-comes-global

Join our brilliant visitor Dr. Marissa Mika for her talk: “Precedented Times: Thinking with African Health Histories After the Chainsaw Comes for Global Health”

• Upcoming Seminar with Dr. John Manton: “Treatment: ailment (artistic afterlives of fieldwork and its possibilities)”, Wednesday 29 October 2025, 4.00-5.30 pm. Info here: https://www.edcma.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/event/treatment-ailment-artistic-afterlives-fieldwork-and-its-possibilities

A lecture-performance exploring the artistic afterlives of fieldwork, first presented at the 2023 EAHMH conference in Oslo.

Stay in touch!

We love hearing from our community: students, alumni, collaborators, friends. Please pass this newsletter along to anyone who might enjoy being part of our circle, and invite them to join our mailing list (details below). 

Thank you for being part of this community. We’re so looking forward to another year of thinking, creating, and celebrating together.

With warmth and gratitude,

Laurie Denyer Willis

Director, Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology

HOW TO SIGN UP TO OUR 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:
• SUBSCRIBE edcma-soc-anth-list - EdCMA Subscriptions NAME (i.e., this is your first name and surname)

If you normally have an automatic signature at the end of your email, please insert the word QUIT just before your signature.

(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.denyerwillis@ed.ac.uk).