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Exploring the Egyptian Revolution and Health Politics Through Comics

Exploring the Egyptian Revolution and Health Politics Through Comics: the making of "Lissa": an ethnoGRAPHIC story

 

Sherine Hamdy will discuss her move from medical anthropological research to working on creating a graphic novel, featuring women from extraordinarily different circumstances each facing a medical decision the other can't understand. Lissa, which takes place against the backdrop of Egypt's popular uprisings, is informed by Hamdy’s ethnographic research in Egypt on the vulnerabilities that expose people to kidney and liver disease, and the difficulties of accessing proper treatment. The work also draws on Coleman Nye’s research in the U.S. on the social and political calculus of managing genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer within a commercial healthcare system. This graphic work of “ethnofiction” tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Anna, the daughter of an America oil company executive living in Cairo, who has a family history of breast cancer and Layla, the daughter of the bawab of Anna’s apartment building, who grows to become a resolute physician struggling for better public health justice and rights in Egypt. Following the women as they grow up together and grapple with difficult medical decisions, the project explores how different people come to terms with illness and mortality against the backdrop of political, economic, and environmental crises. 

 

Sherine Hamdy is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where she joined the faculty in the Fall of 2017, after being a professor for eleven years at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from New York University Department of Anthropology. Her first book Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California, 2012) received Honorable Mention from the 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize from the American Anthropological Association's Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her book project Doctors of the Revolution, co-authored with Soha Bayoumi (Harvard) critically engages with physicians' roles in the recent political upheavals in the Arab world. She is also the Series Editor for University of Toronto Press' ethnoGRAPHIC series, of which Lissa (co-authored by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye) is the debut graphic novel.?

This Film and Media Studies Colloquium event is co-sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Anthropology.

Brown Bag Talk: Not Just Dots On a Map

Dr. Michael Jochim, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Anthropology Department, UC Santa Barbara

Spring 2017 Brown Bag Talk

Not Just Dots On a Map: 35 Years of Archaeological Research on the Last Hunter-Gatherers of Central Europe

Undergrad Chris Turner Wins NSF Award for Graduate Studies

Chris was born and raised in Scotland. He immigrated to the United States at the age of 19, working in a summer camp for disabled children in Connecticut. At the age of 26, Chris joined the military as a US Army Medic and Paratrooper deploying twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. On his first deployment to Iraq, he was awarded the Purple Heart and Army Commendation medal with Valor after his vehicle was ambushed. After spending 10 years in the United States Army Chris went back to school and found anthropology at Antelope Valley Community College.

UCSB Give Day 2018

Dr. Kristin Hoppa Gets Dream Job as Channel Islands Archaeologist

Dr. Kristin Hoppa (PhD 2017), former student of Amber VanDerwarker and Michael Glassow, just accepted a position as the Channel Islands National Park Archaeologist with the National Park Service. This is her dream job and her dissertation was on "Understanding the Role of Interior Sites and Terrestial Resources During the Middle Holocene on Santa Cruz Island". Congratulations Kristin!

Professor Casey Walsh publishes new book, Virtuous Waters

Library Exhibit: "Garimpeiros" (February through August 2018)

Garimpeiros: The Wildcat Gold Miners of the Amazon Rainforest
February 9, 2018 throught August 31, 2018
Location: Ocean Gallery

The UCSB Library presents an exhibition of photographs of illegal gold mines in the Brazilian Amazon.  Curated by Jeffrey Hoelle, UCSB Associate Professor of Anthropology.

The wildcat miners who work in the small-scale and often illegal gold mining camps of the Brazilian Amazon are known as garimpeiros.  Across the centuries, garimpeiros have scoured the most remote reaches of the Amazon rainforest in search of gold.  The garimpeiros unearth the gold that shines across the world, but they have the dirtiest of reputations. Gold mining is responsible for an estimated 10% Amazonian deforestation, as well as mercury contamination and sedimentation of vital rivers.  In international news reports, garimpeiros are presented as violent and immoral villains pillaging the forest beyond the reach of the law. This exhibition provides a deeper understanding of Amazonian garimpeiros through anthropological research conducted in the garimpos in 2014 and 2015.  

Grad Student Sarah Alami's Research Featured On UCSB Current

Grad student Sarah Alami's first-authored paper on the Tsimane indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon has been featured in a new press release from The UCSB Current. Her research details how a harsh and unpredictable environment can impact an individual's willingness to seek available medical care in the Tsimane population.

The press release and the paper it features can be found here: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2018/018753/pound-cure