Contributors

Julie Armin, MA is a graduate student in the medical anthropology program at the University of Arizona (Tucson). Her primary interests focus on the intersection of anthropology and public policy, access to health care in the United States, the political-economy of cancer, and gendered experiences of health. Her dissertation research examines the treatment trajectories of uninsured and low-income breast cancer patients in the border region of Arizona.

Emily Avera received an M.Phil. in Diversity Studies from the University of Cape Town and an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University. She has conducted medical anthropology fieldwork on transplantation and transfusion medicine in South Africa and the Netherlands. Currently the Managing Editor of TransplantInformers, an international blog about transplant donor recruitment supported by the Asian American Donor Program, she is in the process of applying to anthropology PhD programs.

Megan A. Carney, PhD is a critical medical anthropologist specializing in migrant women’s health. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Comparative Border Studies Institute at Arizona State University and Affiliated Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her current research focuses on the broader effects of post-9/11 immigration enforcement practices in the U.S., especially for health-seeking behaviors and mental health in Latino communities. She is also conducting research on Italy’s immigration crisis. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book with University of California Press explores the biopolitics of food insecurity through the lens of women’s lived experiences with migration and social inequality.

Heide Castañeda, PhD, MPH is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. A medical anthropologist who has worked in Germany and in the United States, her primary research interests include migrant and refugee health, social inequality and medicine, and health policy. She is a founding member of the AccessDenied editorial collective.

Elizabeth Cartwright, PhD, RN is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Hispanic Health Projects at Idaho State University and Adjunct Senior Lecturer School of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Psychological Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.  She is a medical anthropologist who has worked with Latinos in Mexico and in the Western United States.  Her research interests include social justice, immigration and native concepts of well being among the Shoshone.  She teaches visual research methods for the NSF at the summer SCRM workshops.  She is the author of Espacios de Enfermedad y Sanación: Los Amuzgos de Oaxaca, Entre la Sierra Sur y los Campos Agrícolas de Sonora (El Colegio de Sonora Press, 2003) and, with Pascale Allotey,the edited volume Women’s Health:  New Frontiers in Advocacy & Social Justice Research (Haworth Medical Press,  2007).

Didier Fassin, MD, PhD is James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the author of seven books, including When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007) and The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (2009), as well as numerous articles in social science and medical journals.  Fassin’s body of work is situated at the intersection of the theoretical and ethnographic foundations of the main areas of anthropology—social, cultural, political, medical. Trained as a medical doctor, he has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France, leading to publications that have illuminated important aspects of urban and maternal health, public health policy, social disparities in health, and the AIDS epidemic. He recently turned to a new area that he calls “critical moral anthropology.” He argues that morality should be treated as a legitimate object of study for anthropologists and analyzed in its political contexts. From this perspective, his work has been concerned with the “politics of compassion,” namely, the various ways in which inequality has been redefined as “suffering,” violence reformulated as “trauma,” and military interventions qualified as “humanitarian.”

Einat Fishbain is an Israeli journalist and founder of The Hottest Place in Hell, a news site focusing on issues of social concern that was recently awarded the inaugural DIGIT prize for online journalism. Her work as a writer, editor, and producer for Israeli print and television media has garnered her multiple awards, including the award-winning column “The New Tel Avivians,” which first brought the lives of migrant workers to the attention of the Israeli public and was awarded the Sokolov Prize in 2000. She is also recipient of the Zchut Award (2010) for her work on the human rights of people with disabilities. 

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, PhD is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago and author of Labor and Legality: Life in a Mexican Immigrant Network(Oxford, 2010). As a cultural anthropologist who works with undocumented people in Chicago, her primary research interests concern the agency of undocumented workers as they respond to constraints of illegal status and illegalization/criminalization as mechanisms of persistent inequality in a “post-racial” United States.

Nora Gottlieb, MA is a PhD student in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She has been working and volunteering for Physicians for Human Rights–Israel since 2005. Her fields of interest include political determinants of health; concepts of health rights, social justice and citizenship; migration and health; and gender and health.

Peter Guarnaccia, PhD is Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Cook College and Investigator at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His research interests include cross-cultural patterns of psychiatric disorders, cultural competence in mental health organizations, and processes of cultural and health change among Latino immigrants.

Karen Hacker, MD, MPH is Executive Director of the Institute for Community Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Her research interests include immigrant health, adolescent health, child mental health promotion and screening, and primary care.

Lauren Heidbrink is an Assistant Professor in Social and Behavioral Sciences and Co-Director of the Public Policy program at National Louis University in Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include the anthropology of childhood and youth, transnational migration, performance and identity, law at the margins of the state and Latin America. She recent published an ethnography on unaccompanied child migration and detention entitled Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

Josiah McC. Heyman, PhD is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at University of Texas El Paso (for identification purposes only). He is currently conducting research on access and barriers to health care for immigrants, and Latinos more generally, in El Paso, Texas. His previous work has examined U.S. border enforcement, U.S. border officers, and border communities and cultures. He is the author of Finding a Moral Heart for U.S. Immigration Policy: An Anthropological Perspective (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association), Life and Labor on the Border: Working People of Northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886-1986 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), and more than fifty scholarly articles and book chapters.  He was chair of the Society for Applied Anthropology Public Policy committee from 2001-2007 and has participated extensively in the U.S.-Mexico Border and Immigration Task Force.

Jennifer S. Hirsch, PhD is Professor in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, U.S.-Mexico migration and migrant health, and the applications of anthropological theory and methods to public health research and programs. Her books include the 2003 landmark volume, A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families, which explored changing ideas and practices of love, sexuality and marriage among Mexicans in the U.S. and in Mexico, and two edited volumes on the comparative anthropology of love (Modern Loves, edited with Holly Wardlow, and Love and Globalization, edited with Mark Padilla, Richard Parker, Miguel Muñoz Laboy, and Robert Sember). She is also lead author of The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV, which presents findings from a recently completed NIH-funded comparative ethnographic study that explores the factors that put married women at risk for HIV infection in five countries: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea.

Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health and the Graduate Program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. His work as a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician focuses broadly on social hierarchies, health disparities, and the ways in which perceptions of social difference naturalize and normalize these inequalities. He is author of  Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (University of California, 2013) which examines the experiences of migrant farmworkers and the conditions that undermine migrant health and healthcare.

Susann Huschke, MA is a PhD student at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her doctoral research  focuses on health and sickness among undocumented Latin American migrants in Berlin. She is a member of the Berlin Office for medical assistance for refugees (Büro für medizinische Flüchtlingshilfe), an NGO providing health care to undocumented migrants. Since 1998, she has been working as a freelance journalist.

Jennifer Kasper, MD, MPH is Faculty in the Division of Global Health, Department of Pediatrics at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, and the Chair of the International Volunteer Committee for Doctors for Global Health. She is a pediatrician at the MGH Chelsea HealthCare Center, serving Latino immigrant families. Her areas of expertise include child poverty, immigrant health and human rights; health service delivery; rural community development; and curriculum development, training and mentorship of community health workers and other health professionals.

Nora Kenworthy is a PhD student in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, where she is also a fellow with the Columbia Population Research Center. Her work focuses on political determinants of health, and how health systems and health-seeking impact citizenship, political participation, and social belonging. She recently completed a research project on undocumented immigrants in psychiatric institutions in the U.S., with funding from the Center to Study Recovery in Social Contexts.

Nolan Kline, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Professor in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue University. He received a PhD in applied anthropology and an MPH from the University of South Florida. His research interests include im/migrant health, the political economy of health, social determinants of health, immigrant policing, biopolitics, and sexual health.  He is a founding member of the AccessDenied editorial collective.

Ben Langer is a medical student at Western University in London, Ontario. His research interests include migration and health, and a critical approach to global public health security. He has conducted fieldwork on the securitization and militarization of public health in Israel and Palestine, focusing on avian flu preparedness, and is currently conducting research on the experiences of African asylum seekers in Israel.

Stéphanie Larchanché, PhD is a post-doctoral researcher at IRIS-EHESS in Paris, and she carries out applied research at a mental health care center specifically catering to immigrants and asylum seekers (Centre Françoise Minkowska, Paris). As a medical anthropologist, her research interests include immigrant health (with a particular focus on mental health and issues of “cultural competence”), health inequalities, and health policies.

Laurie Lijnders received an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the Utrecht University, where she concentrated on migration, borders, and violence. She has researched experiences and expressions of torture and sexual abuse in the borderlands of the Northern Sinai desert and the journey of African asylum seekers from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East. She works in the Open Clinic of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and is involved in several research projects on the journeys and lives of African asylum seekers in Israel.

Haggai Matar is an Israeli journalist and political activist. After writing for the short-lived Palestine Times, Ha’ir Tel Aviv of the Ha’aretz group, and Zman Tel Aviv, the local supplement of Ma’ariv(where he became chairman of the journalists’ union chapter), he now works as a freelance journalist. Matar was awarded the 2012 Anna Lindh Mediterranean Journalist Award for his+972 series on the separation wall. In 2002, he was part of the Shministim (Seniors) Letter to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and was imprisoned for two years for his refusal to enlist in the Israeli army. Since his release, he has been active in various groups against the occupation, as well as several class-based struggles within Israeli society. This piece is slightly amended from the original that appeared at +972, where Matar is a regular contributor.

Helen B. Marrow, PhD is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University and former Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at the Universities of California at Berkeley and San Francisco. She is author of New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Stanford University Press, 2011), co-editor of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965 (Harvard University Press, 2007), and recipient of the 2008 Best Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association.

Juliana Morris, BA is a third-year student at Harvard Medical School pursuing a career in family medicine. Before entering medical school, she worked for three years with immigrant-serving non-profits in the U.S. and Mexico. Her research interests include immigrant health, access to care issues, and social determinants of health.

Jessica Mulligan, PhD is Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Providence College.  She has conducted research in Puerto Rico and Connecticut on health disparities, collaborative research methods, immigration, health reform, and managed care.  She is a founding member of the AccessDenied blog team.

Lori A. Nessel, JD is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University School of Law. She has written scholarly articles analyzing medical repatriation from a human rights perspective, especially in the context of workers’ rights. Her areas of expertise include immigration, human rights, and the intersection of labor and immigration laws. She regularly teaches Immigration and Naturalization Law and the Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic, and she has also taught International Human Rights Law and Gender and the Law and designed human rights programs in Haiti and Guatemala. At the Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic, she supervises litigation in asylum and relief from removal cases as well as litigation, advocacy and reporting on human rights issues.

Nia Parson, PhD is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.  She is interested broadly in the relationships of gender, violence, and health. She was a National Institute for Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Health at Rutgers University where she researched domestic violence among Spanish-speaking immigrants.  She has published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly and has an article forthcoming in Violence Against Women.  She is currently writing a book based on research on women’s experiences of domestic violence in post-dictatorship Chile entitled Post-traumatic States: Gender Violence and Subjectivity in Chile.  With the support of a Hogg Foundation for Mental Health grant she is currently studying mental health care for Mexican immigrant women who have suffered domestic violence in Dallas, TX.

James Quesada, PhD is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. A medical anthropologist who works in Nicaragua and California, his interests focus primarily on the nature and consequences of structural violence, especially in relation to transnational migration.

Priyanka Rao, MS is a graduate student in the Consumer Science Department at Purdue University. She is a graduate Research Assistant in the Health Disparities lab with a BA in Psychology. Her research interest lies in marketing and the decision-making behavior of consumers.

Robin Reineke is a PhD student in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include migration, the U.S.-Mexico border, death, human rights, forensic anthropology, and the identification of human remains. Her ongoing dissertation research involves multi-sited ethnography in Tucson, Arizona, and in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico into the causes and effects of migrant deaths, and the family and institutional approaches to locating, identifying, and burying these bodies.

Sural Shah, MD is an adult and pediatric primary care provider at Cambridge Health Alliance and a Masters in Public Health candidate at Harvard School of Public Health focusing on immigrant health and healthcare access. She graduated from Penn State College of Medicine and completed her Internal Medicine and Pediatrics Residency at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has provided care as a staff physician at Puentes de Salud, a non-profit clinic providing health and social services to a largely Latino and unauthorized community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has also been a Fogarty International Clinical Research Scholar and a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. She is currently a Kraft Fellow in Community Health Leadership through Partners HealthCare.

Cheryl Staats joined the staff of the Kirwan Institute in October 2007 as a Research Assistant.  She is a graduate of the University of Dayton with a BA in Sociology and Spanish, and she holds an MA in Sociology from The Ohio State University.

Rachel Stonecipher is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with concentrations in critical cultural media studies, digital media, and visual communication. Stonecipher recently completed a two-year research project on the practice and experience of migrant advocacy work on the U.S.-Mexico border. She has also served as lead interviewer for a study of food insecurity in North Texas. 

Maggie Sullivan, RN, MS, FNP-BC is a family nurse practitioner at Boston Health Care for the Homeless. A graduate of UCSF’s Family Healthcare Nursing Program, she has provided medical care to underserved communities at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, Berkeley Free Clinic, St. Anthony’s Free Clinic, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, Planned Parenthood, and Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center. She has also completed a fellowship in farmworker health with the Migrant Clinicians Network and an internship with Partners In Health’s Institute for Health and Social Justice. She is lead author of “Mental Health of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants: A Review of the Literature” (Advances in Nursing Science, 2005), and contributor to OpenForum, the companion blog to Health and Human Rights: An International Journal. She currently co-moderates and contributes to the Global Health Delivery Project’s online global health nursing and midwifery community.

Emily Vasquez is pursuing an MPH at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.  She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where, as a Public Policy major, she focused on immigrant social policy.  She was awarded a U.S. Student Fulbright grant to study the impacts of international migration on migrant-sending communities in Paraguay.

Sarah S. Willen, PhD, MPH is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Human Rights Institute’s Research Program on Global Health and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. She is guest editor or co-editor of special issues of Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry (2013),  Social Science & Medicine (2012), Ethos (2012), and International Migration (2007) and editor of Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context (Lexington, 2007). She is also co-editor of A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Shattering Culture: How American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity (Russell Sage, 2011) and author of articles in Social Science & Medicine (2012), the Journal of Human Rights (2012), Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2011), and the Harvard Review of Psychiatry (2010), among others. She is a founding member of the AccessDenied editorial collective.

Kristin Elizabeth Yarris, PhD MPH MA, is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of global health, global mental health, social and cultural determinants of health, transnational migration and family life, and migrant and refugee health. Kristin is a faculty mentor for the Latino Mental Health Research and Training program. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, “Grandmothers and Global Migration: Intergenerational Caregiving in Nicaraguan Transnational Families.”