Columbia University's Global Health Research Center of Central Asia (GHRCCA) began a Culture, Religion, and Communication Unit (CRC) in 2010 that attempts to unite a diverse group of professionals to foster culturally-specific and culturally-inspired approaches to health-related research in Central Asia. It is their hope that policy can become more fruitful and sustainable through a direct investment in a region's history, cultures, religions, and languages. On April 8th, they will sponsor their first conference, "Healing Paradigms and the Politics of Health in Central Asia," with Columbia Global Centers, the Harriman Institute, and Columbia University Seminars. This conference will highlight notions of spirituality in health and how practices can conflict with state agendas. Please see the abstracts listed below for more information.
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The Culture, Religion, and Communications Unit of the
Global Health Research Center of Central Asia at Columbia University
Presents its First Annual Conference:
Healing Paradigms and the Politics of Health in Central Asia
Kellogg Center, Columbia University
420 West 118th Street, 15th floor
April 8, 2011
PLEASE RSVP TO:
https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/register.php?eventID=48012
9:00-9:40
Breakfast (provided for participants & audience)
9:45-9:50
Welcome: Allen Zweben, Associate Dean, Columbia University School of Social Work
9:50-10:00
Introductory Remarks: Valentina Izmirlieva, Director of the Culture, Religion, and Communications Unit, Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
10:00-11:15
Key-Note Lecture: Salmaan Keshavjee (Harvard University), "Bleeding Babies in Badakhshan: The Political Economy of Culture and Illness"
11:15-11:30
Coffee Break
11:30-1:15
Panel I: Healing Paradigms: Biomedicine and Its Ethno-Religious Alternatives
Presenters:
Devin DeWeese (Indiana University), "The Locus of Healing in Islamic Central Asia: Shrines, Sufism, 'Shamanism,' and the Boundaries of Religion"
Danuta Penkala-Gawecka (Adam Mickiewicz University), "Mentally Ill or Chosen by Spirits? Illness Concepts and the Revival of Spiritual Healing in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan"
Jeff Sahadeo (Carleton University), "Cholera and Colonialism in Central Asia: The Tashkent Riot of 1892"
Respondent:
Paula Michaels (University of Iowa)
1:15-2:30
Lunch (provided for participants & audience)
2:30-4:15
Panel II: The Politics of (Global) Health: Intervention, Control, and Institutional Power
Presenters:
Alisher Latypov (University College London), "The Opium War at the 'Roof of the World': The Administration of Addiction in Soviet Badakhshan"
Erica Johnson (University of North Carolina), "Health Care as a Tool of Authoritarian Survival in post-Soviet Central Asia"
Erin Koch (University of Kentucky), "Illness, Marginalization, and Global Health Interventions in Post-Soviet Eurasia"
Respondent:
Richard Elovich (Columbia)
4:15-4:45
Closing Remarks: Valentina Izmirlieva (Columbia)
4:45-6:00
Reception
Conference Participants:
Devin DeWeese is a Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. His research interests include Islamic Central Asia, Soviet Central Asia, Sufism, Islamization, religions and Inner Asia, and Islamic hagiography, and he has recently taught courses on religion and power in Islamic Central Asia, Islam in the Soviet Union and its successor states, and on the Islamic hagiography of Central Asia. Among his publications is the book Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994 Series "Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions").
Richard Elovich, a research scientist at the Insitute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University, holds a Ph.D. in medical sociology and a Masters in Public Health. He is a specialist in policy and program development on HIV/AIDS and substance use with over fifteen years experience in the U.S. and internationally. Since 2003, he has led needs assessments and developed HIV programs for international donors, UN agencies, and non-governmental organizations throughout the former Soviet Union and Asia, with a particular focus on most at risk populations.
Erica Johnson is Lecturer and Director of Master's Studies in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political economy, with particular focus on post-Soviet state-society relations. Before joining the UNC faculty, Erica was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She holds an MA (2005) and PhD (2009) in Political Science from University of Washington in Seattle and an MA (1997) in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies from UW.
Salmaan Keshavjee received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard in 1998 and his MD from Stanford in 2001. Dr. Keshavjee is now an Assistant Professor in Social Medicine and in Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and a Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. He conducted doctoral research in medical anthropology at Harvard University on the health transition in post-Soviet Tajikistan. He currently works with the Division of Global Health Equity and Partners In Health on the implementation of a multidrug-resistant TB treatment program in Tomsk, Russia, and a program to treat patients co-infected with HIV and multidrug- resistant TB in Lesotho.
Erin Koch is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching interests include postsocialism, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and global health and humanitarianism. Koch?s prior research in the Republic of Georgia examined the effects of Soviet collapse on tuberculosis and responses to tuberculosis in Georgia. Her current research in Georgia investigates health effects of war and displacement, medical interventions, and politics of care.
Alisher Latypov, MA (Tajik State National University), MHS (Johns Hopkins University), MA (University College London) is a PhD student at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. His doctoral thesis is entitled "The Administration of Addiction: The Politics of Medicine and Opiate Use in Soviet Tajikistan, 1924-1958." He has also served in the Tajik Presidential Drug Control Agency, directed the country office of Global Initiative on Psychiatry in Tajikistan and assisted UNDP as Sub-Regional Drug Epidemiology Expert for Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He is a corresponding member of the Reference Group to the United Nations on HIV and Injecting Drug Use and has published broadly on the politics of health and healing in Central Asia.
Paula Michaels is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin?s Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), winner of the Association of Women in Slavic Studies? Heldt Prize and a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. Michaels has published numerous articles on the history of medicine, women's history, and film history. With funding from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the NIH, she is currently working on an international history of the Lamaze method of childbirth.
Danuta Penkala-Gawecka is Professor of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. Her areas of expertise include medical anthropology and Central Asian studies. She conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Poland. Her interests focus on medical pluralism, traditional and complementary/alternative medicines in Central Asia and the connections between medicine and religion. She published books: Traditional Medicine in Afghanistan and its Transformations, Wrocaw 1988; Complementary Medicine in Kazakhstan: The Force of Tradition and the Pressure of Globalisation, Poznan 2006. She is editor of the oldest Polish ethnological journal "Lud" founded in 1895.
Jeff Sahadeo is an Associate Professor of Political Science and European & Russian Studies at Carleton University. He received his Ph. D. from the Universityp of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His teaching interests include diaspora, migration, and empire in Eastern Europe and Asia. He also works on issues of colonialism, nationality, frontiers, and borders in relations of power and the creation of identities and states. A specialist on Central Asia, Dr. Sahadeo has conducted extensive work in Uzbekistan. He also teaches courses on the eastwards expansion of the European Union. Dr. Sahadeo's current research focuses on issues of migration and interethnic contact between Asian populations of the (former) Soviet Union and majority Russians in the cities of Leningrad/ St. Petersburg and Moscow in the post World War II era.
For more information: http://ghrcca.columbia.edu/en/node/118 or email crc2011conference@gmail.com
Please RSVP to: https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/register.php?eventID=4801
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