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Last update: 9/14/01
 |
Michele Rivkin-Fish |
My research program examines issues related to health and gender as a conceptual lens to illuminate the broader social and political processes of emerging market democracies in Russia and Poland. Theoretically, my work contributes to feminist and medical anthropological arguments that link reproductive politics and practices with transformations of the state and citizenship. By employing multiple methods of investigation, including participant-observation fieldwork, interviews, and textual analysis, I seek to capture the ways that knowledge and practice both reflect historical, political-economic, and symbolic forces and actively negotiate or challenge them. My approach brings into view a range of actors and levels of analysis, from international development consultants to state policy makers, demographic experts, clinic- based professionals, community activists, and laypersons, as well as the interactions between them. Most specifically, my research analyzes health care reforms, debates and policies on reproduction and demography, and the daily struggles of women and men to secure health and well-being as privatization expands in official and unofficial ways. With this agenda, my present and future research goals involve using insights from postsocialist contexts to further an analytical approach to health and biomedicine that is both overtly historical and reaches beyond the clinical and micro-levels to assess state, regional, and global dimensions of political-economic and cultural change.
Recent publications
Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention ( Indiana University Press, forthcoming, summer 2005.)
2004 " 'Change Yourself and the Whole World Will Become Kinder':
Russian Activists for Reproductive Health and the Limits of Claims Making
for Women" Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18(3): 281-304.
2003 "Anthropology, Demography, and the Search for a Critical Analysis of Fertility: Insights from Russia" American Anthropologist 105(2):289-301.
2000 "Health Development Meets the End of State Socialism: Visions of Democratization, Women's Health, and Social Well-Being for Contemporary Russia" Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 24: 77-100.
1999 "Sexuality Education in Russia: Defining Pleasure and Danger for a Fledgling Democratic Society" Social Science and Medicine 49(6): 801-814.