Medical Anthropology Quarterly

This article examines the making of clinical care by tracing how music therapists integrate their work within North American hospitals. Situated on the margins of the clinic, music therapists are in pursuit of clinical recognition-to be perceived and understood as valuable to biomedicine. The pursuit of clinical recognition illustrates how the configuration of care is an aesthetic concern, negotiated not only through processes of reasoning and rationalization but also through sensory-affective experiences. Music therapists cultivate a clinical aesthetic to their care by demonstrating clinical efficacy to their medical colleagues and self-fashioning clinical subjectivities through participation in medical rounds and charting...

Anthropologists have critiqued cultural competence programs in medical settings while introducing mental health clinicians to social theories on culture for practice. We explore how patients articulated narratives about themselves and how clinicians responded to such narratives through an intervention known as the Cultural Formulation Interview that anthropologists have helped develop. We conducted over 500 hours of fieldwork from 2014 to 2019 at an outpatient clinic in New York, analyzing multiple data (participant observation, medical records, patient-clinician sessions, and individual debriefing interviews) in a trial joining clinical and ethnographic methods...

Joining in virtual conversation, Ashanté M. Reese and Sheyda M. Aboii explore their engagements with Black feminist praxis and theory in their ethnographic fieldwork and emergent projects. Marking the start of the inaugural Black Feminist Health Science Studies (BFHSS) Collaboratory in May 2021, this edited interview between a professor and graduate student addresses perspectives on what it might mean to work alongside others and attend to methods of Black life and Black livingness. Together, Reese and Aboii consider refusal as a careful balance between documentation and redaction in their work...

Mental health has become an exceptionally important social and public health issue in Australia. The government has invested billions of dollars in new services, while ubiquitous ad campaigns call on ordinary people to tend to their psychological well-being. This national valorization of mental health is striking, given the well-documented psychiatric harm suffered by refugees under Australia's offshore detention regime. This article draws on ethnographic work with a group of volunteer therapists who provide crisis counseling to these detained refugees over WhatsApp, allowing them to intervene in scenarios where therapy is inaccessible but badly needed...

Regulations governing assisted reproduction control the degree to which gamete donation is legal and how people providing genetic material are selected and compensated. The United States and Spain are both global leaders in fertility treatment with donor oocytes. Yet both countries take different approaches to how egg donation is regulated. The US model reveals a hierarchically organized form of gendered eugenics. In Spain, the eugenic aspects of donor selection are more subtle. Drawing upon fieldwork in the United States and Spain, this article examines (1) how compensated egg donation operates under two regulatory settings, (2) the implications for egg donors as providers of bioproducts, and (3) how advances in oocyte vitrification enhances the commodity quality of human eggs...

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This autoethnographic visual essay narrates a Black feminist praxis of ancestral collage-making within my curation of #blackgirlquarantine: an exhibition of blackwomxnhealing in the wake of 20201 (BGQ). I detail my spiritual, affective, and embodied journey of stretching collage art to make room for memorializing the lives of Black womxn and girls who are no longer here to tell their stories. I write at the intersection of healing, memory, and mourning, and merge a Methodology for the Black Feminist Sacred2 with visual anthropology and digital humanities to read creative rituals of digital altar work as text...

This article examines the citational politics of teaching, learning, and doing ethnographic projects that study up in medical anthropology by examining the references that are often cited, the ones that exist but are not widely circulated, and the gaps in between. I take a reflexive approach to understanding how my positionality shaped my path toward studying up. In so doing, I reveal the complex tensions of implementing ethnographic methods in spaces that are (intentionally) challenging to access while simultaneously being embedded within academic and social environments that are plagued by hierarchical power relations...

Vaccine skepticism, and the related practices of selective- or non-vaccination, has steadily grown in the twenty-first century, especially among US mothers. The phenomenon has been especially pronounced in Oregon, which ranked first nationally for the number of kindergarteners with nonmedical exemptions in 2018. Based on 12 months of digital research in Oregon in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, my findings suggest that mothers' vaccine skepticism emerges from experiences of iatrogenesis from childhood through childbirth...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.