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Welcome back!

Hello everyone, and welcome to September in Edinburgh, when the Fringe crowds disappear, and we are surrounded instead by new & returning students. George Square definitely has that lovely September vibe right now: a real mix of happy energy & mild (generative?) chaos. 

So, first of all: welcome back! 

And a very big & warm welcome to our new MSc Medical Anthropology students. I met many of you this week in our first class in Using Ethnographic Methods in Interdisciplinary Health Research, and it was such a lovely way to begin the year and get to know many of you. 

Right off the bat, before anything else, the most important thing in this newsletter: Please come & see us this Friday! We are properly marking the beginning of the EdCMA year this Friday, the 25th of September, and everyone is very warmly invited. We’ll begin at 3pm with our visiting speaker Janina Kehr (University of Vienna), speaking on The Mediscene: On Medicine and Extractivism. Janina asks what happens when we look beyond medicine as treatment or cure, and attend instead to its environmental impacts, labour, material infrastructures and extractive operations (and what this might mean for medical critique today). 

The seminar runs from 3 to 4.30pm in the Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building, and will be followed immediately by our EdCMA Welcome Back Reception, from 4.30 to 5.30pm. Please do come to the talk, the reception, or both. If you’re new to EdCMA, this is a very good moment just to turn up, meet people, have a drink, and find out who we are. All details on the events are here: https://www.edcma.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/event/mediscene-medicine-and-extractivism. 

All Welcome! 

Things to Celebrate: 

I want to draw your attention to some wonderful things colleagues have been doing & publishing recently: 

Some big & wonderful news from Miranda Tuckett: Miranda has also won the Disability Research Interest Group essay prize, presented by the Society for Medical Anthropology, for her piece: “The Assist in Assisted Suicide: Vulnerability, Personhood, and Ableist Policing”. This is genuinely big news. Huge congratulations Miranda! Over the summer, Miranda also published her chapter “Gifts from Beyond the Grave: Exploring Imagination and Creativity in Grief”, in the new Routledge collection All Things Re-Imagined: Creative and Aesthetic Strategies of Grief. 

Meredith Evans has co-convened the new MadPsychedelics Collaboratory, an international interdisciplinary network exploring intersections between madness and psychedelics and creating space for research, dialogue and community engagement. Their new website is now live and very much worth exploring. Meredith also has an article with colleagues in Anthropology & Aging: “The older you get, the less people care about you”: The Sexual and Reproductive Health Management of Older Women with Disabilities in Canada During the COVID-19 Pandemic. The article draws on the experiences of disabled women in Canada to examine how ageism, ableism, sexism and racism shaped access to sexual and reproductive healthcare during the pandemic.

Grace Zhou has two new publications in Ethnos. With Michael Degani, Grace has co-authored an Introduction to their Special Issue, “The Many Faces of the Parasite”. Grace’s own research article is in the series too: “Making a Home with/in Others: Addiction, Dependence, and Parasitic Politics in Kyrgyzstan”, drawing us into questions of addiction, dependence, home-making and obligation; pressing the reader to think differently about the difficult and intimate ways people make lives with and through others.

And do take a look at Stefan Ecks new blog, https://livingvaluetheory.org/, where he is regularly posting new writing. 

A writer’s space?

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately & in the process thinking a lot about how writing happens. Or, maybe the truth is more like: I’ve been preoccupied about how my own best writing happens, how we can create writing spaces that actually work for people, and how we can encourage writers (at all stages) to build happy writerly communities. For me, my best writing has never emerged from being alone. My best writing has always been done in community: from PhD student writing groups that met daily, to works-in-progress groups that have held me accountable, to my dear Anthro Co-Write group that met at 5am online via Discord! It has been through these groups that I’ve talked out half-formed ideas, become unstuck, learned that waiting for the writing conditions to be exactly right means almost no writing ever gets done, and gotten over my fear of the first draft (it will always be bad!). 

At EdCMA right now we are thinking through all of this, and we spent much of our last meeting together thinking about how we can try to make space for more of this this year: in writing groups, with writing buddies, basically crafting spaces where the messy half-formed thing has space to breathe. I also get that this takes bravery: It is very exposing to show someone something before you have made it properly good, even when we know that most good writing is never ready & polished right from the start. More often than not, first drafts are fragments, rough prose, point form notes, or words that wind up deleted in the final draft. And on the other side, we also need to get better at being generous readers for each other. This, I’ve found, takes time and practice too. Learning to be good at receiving someone’s half-formed ideas is a real skill we must cultivate: learning to read for what might be in there, even if it’s not yet in focus. Learning to ask open & kind questions that help move something forward. Just the other day, someone read something half thought out of mine & just said ‘oh I want to hear more about that’. I’m going to tuck that gentle line into my own repertoire! 

I know I’ve lost the plot a little here in this newsletter, but all of this is just to say that at EdCMA we are keen to become an academic community where we can trust each other with our unfinished things. So please do watch this space, or reach out to me directly, as over the year EdCMA is going to experiment more with writing alongside one another, finding writing partners, making small writing groups, swapping pages, sharing ideas before they are ready, reading generously, and talking things through.

And back to our new students…

Finally, one more big welcome again to our new Medical Anthropology MSc cohort. We’re very glad you’re here. I really hope you’ll think of EdCMA as belonging to you too: so please do come to seminars, come to our events, bring your friends, ask questions, tell us what you are working on, and introduce yourself when you see us around. If you are reading this from further afield and thinking about studying Medical Anthropology in Edinburgh (or know somebody who might be) do have a look at our information page about studying Medical Anthropology: https://www.edcma.sps.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/why-study-medical-anthropology-university-edinburgh

For now, though: please do come and join us on Friday!

Here’s to a year of rough ideas, good conversations, brave sharing, generous readers, bad first drafts, unexpected notes, and writing that gets better because we didn’t make it alone.  

With warmth,

Laurie Denyer Willis
Director, Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology