A panel of five medical anthropologists will discuss their scholarship and the work of Paul Farmer, a physician who is the subject of Elon’s common reading for 2006-2007, during a panel presentation at 7 p.m., Monday, Oct. 2 in Whitley Auditorium on the Elon campus. The program is free and open to the public.
Farmer is the subject of “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” Elon’s common reading for the year. The book, by author Tracy Kidder, explores the work of Farmer, a young physician who has worked with poor and disadvantaged peoples around the world.
The panel will include anthropologists who have worked in a variety of locations. Joan Paluzzi of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who worked for three years for Farmer’s organization, Partners for Health; Patricia Whelehan of the State University of New York-Potsdam, whose scholarship focuses on human sexuality and HIV/AIDS; Kaja Finkler of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has investigated narratives of women in pain in Mexico and biotechnology and kinship in North Carolina; Samantha Solimeo of Duke University, a feminist medical anthropologist who studies aging as a cultural process; and Cassandra White of Georgia State University, whose scholarship explores medical discourses in Brazil.
The panel discussion is sponsored by the General Studies Program, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Program for Ethnographic Research and Community Studies (PERCS), the Women’s/Gender Studies Program, and Project Pericles.
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