Abstract
In this seminar, I would like to open up discussion on a perennial topic within (medical) anthropology: the bearing of a researcher's identity on how the research is carried out, produced and written about. Drawing on my own research on health promotion programmes in rural Ethiopia and experience of shifting disciplines between anthropology and history, I will discuss the uneasy question of positionality in ethnography, and the constant temptation to produce 'author-evacuated text'.
Bio
Sarah Howard is an anthropologist and a researcher on the Wellcome Trust-funded Connecting Three Worlds project that is pioneering a new history of global health that incorporates the socialist world. Sarah’s contribution to the project will explore the contours, political and intellectual origins, and collaborative co-production of Derg-era public health, and trace its contemporary legacies in Ethiopia. She is working on a monograph provisionally titled 'Stable Jobs, Precarious Lives’, which is an ethnographic exploration of the everyday rural state in Ethiopia through the lives and aspirations of its lowest level workers, and is also developing a new project, a historical-ethnographic account of early-years childcare in Ethiopia.
About the seminar series
This seminar is a part of the Medical Anthropology and Medical History Seminar Series (MAH). Sign up to our mailing list at sympa.uio.no to receive regular invitations.