Joint UCB/UCSF Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley, University of California, San Francisco
The Joint UCB/UCSF Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology is one of the pioneering programs in the discipline both nationally and globally. The program provides disciplinary leadership and an outstanding and comprehensive training leading to the Ph.D. degree. No other program offers the Joint Program’s combination of excellence in critical medical anthropology; psychiatric and psychological anthropology; gender and queer theory; disability studies; health, citizenship, immigration and the global; violence in wartime and peacetime as a medical topic; studies of science, technology and modernity; intersections of medicine and social theory; and innovative ethnographic scholarship. The core faculty on the Berkeley side of the Joint Program form an organized research group called Critical Studies in Medicine, Science, and the Body. This group links medical anthropology, science and technology studies, postcolonial anthropology, disability studies, critical development and humanitarianism studies, psychological and psychoanalytic anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.
There are eight faculty in the group: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Chair of the doctoral degree program in Medical Anthropology; Paul Rabinow, Director of the Project on Genomics and Society; Lawrence Cohen, Co-director of Medical Anthropology; Stefania Pandolfo, Graduate Advisor of Medical Anthropology; Charles L. Briggs, Co-chair of Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Equity Officer of Medical Anthropology, and Program Director of Folklore; Cori Hayden, Chair of Anthropology; Seth Holmes, Co-chair of Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Co-director of MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology (UCB and UCSF); and Karen Nakamura, Director of Disability Studies Lab. Together with medical anthropology colleagues at UCSF, sociocultural colleagues at Berkeley, and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program and in the Department of Anthropology, these scholars have created both the most diverse and the most contemporary program in the field. Alumni from this program have moved on to leading positions across the country and the world and continue to move the field in new directions.
In addition, our colleagues on the UCSF side of the Joint Program contribute cutting-edge anthropological work on global health, humanitarianism, critical studies of racialization, metrics in the health sciences, urban health, social studies of science and genetics, gender and health, aging and death, dental health, the ethics of research and care, and medical history. The breadth and depth of our core faculty at Berkeley, our links with colleagues across the Berkeley campus, and our close educational and research collaboration with faculty on the UCSF side of the Joint Program make this one of the most broad and dynamic contexts for medical anthropology in the country and in the world.
In 2013 Nancy Scheper-Hughes and MD/PhD graduate student launched a new project with a two year grant from the UCHRI: Exploring Radical Experiments in clinical medicine, community psychiatry, and medical anthropology. The project, now called “Rad Med” has brought together some 50 participants in a social movement that includes faculty in anthropology, medicine, public health, community psychiatry, ER doctors, and community activists to challenge medical training by introducing a curriculum in “structural competency” — focusing on the social and political structures of violence that produce illness , disease epidemics, and premature deaths in poor communities to medical residents . In the fall of 2016 our conference on Structural Competency brought more than 400 participants from throughout the state of California and from the east coast. Structural Competency has become a social movement among medical students, community doctors, nurses, social workers, hospital chaplains, and community activists.
Contact Information
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Chair
United States http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/graduate/medical-anthropology
nsh@berkeley.edu
Region
North America
Academic Program
Ph.D.
Fellowships and Potential Scholarly Affiliations