Medical anthropology is the fastest-growing applied specialty within anthropology today. Questions of health, care and wellbeing are at the cornerstone of medical anthropological research. However, in the context of ex-Yugoslav countries medical anthropology is scattered as an academic discipline. The aim of this talk is to bring together medical anthropologist who both address the questions of mental health in former Yugoslavia – Dr. Peter Locke  and dr. Jelena Kupsjak in order to jointly discuss what it like is to conduct anthropological research on health, care and wellbeing in this region.

Bio:

Peter Locke is a cultural and medical anthropologist (PhD Princeton University, 2009) and has conducted fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia and in Sierra Leone on postwar trauma and mental health initiatives. Since 2014, he teaches in Northwestern University’s Global Health Studies program and directs an 8-week summer school in Belgrade and Sarajevo on health and mental health care systems in the region. Recent publications include the volume Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming (2017, Duke University Press) with João Biehl.

Jelena Kupsjak is a postdoc at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Zadar, Croatia where she teaches Introduction to ethnology and cultural anthropology, Medical anthropology and Economic anthropology. She is a coeditor of Politički leksikon (politicki-leksikon.com). Her research interests are in social and health care policy, care and precarity.