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Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) 

Hansjörg Dilger is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. From 2007-13, he was a Junior Professor for Religious Diversity in Transnational Contexts at FU Berlin and from 2005-07 Assistant Professor for African Health and Society at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His research and teaching interests in the field of medical anthropology include HIV/AIDS and social relations; religion and medicine; mobility, migration and health; the anthropology of transnational health interventions; global flows of medical knowledge and healing landscapes; and professionalization processes. Regionally, he focuses on eastern and southern Africa as well as on migratory contexts in Germany.
Between 1995 and 2006, Dilger conducted fieldwork on HIV/AIDS and social relations in rural and urban Tanzania, focusing initially on young people’s discourse on AIDS, morality and modernity. He also studied the experiences and life-worlds of people living with HIV/AIDS and their social and family networks in the context of rural-urban migration. Since 2008, he has done research on Christian and Muslim schooling in Dar es Salaam and the social, political and moral presence of religion in urban Tanzania in the wake of neoliberal restructuring. Dilger is co-editor of several edited volumes and special issues, including Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa: Transnational Health and Healing (2012, with A. Kane and S. Langwick); Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of Aids in Africa (2010, with U. Luig); and Global AIDS Medicines in East African Health Institutions (Special Issue in Medical Anthropology 2011, with A. Hardon).
Dilger is head of the Research Area Medical Anthropology at Freie Univcersität Berlin. He is also a board member of the International Research Network “Religion, AIDS and Social Transformation in Africa” (RASTA) and research partner of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Research Focus “Medical Diversity.” Between 2004 and 2010, he was the chair of the Working Group Medical Anthropology within the German Anthropological Association (DGV e.V.). His more applied work includes consultancies for the German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ, now GIZ) and collaborations with health institutions regarding the provision of medical care for patients with a migratory background in Berlin.
 

Anita Hardon (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) 

Anita Hardon has been trained as a medical biologist and medical anthropologist (PhD). Her research career has taken shape around multi-sited anthropological studies of global health technologies. Over the course of these research programs, she has provided intensive guidance to young researchers (many from Africa and Asia), engaging them in the joint writing of books and special issues of journals. At present she is Scientific Director, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, and Professor in Anthropology of Care and Health. She co-directs the Research Priority Area Global Health of the University of Amsterdam. Anita Hardon is co-author of the Social Lives of Medicines (2002). She publishes regularly in a wide diversity of journals, including Social Science and Medicine, Medical Anthropology and Culture Health and Sexuality. Recently she edited a Special issue on Secrecy as embodied practice (2012). She is currently conducted a study on the chemical lives of young people (ChemicalYouth), which was awarded an ERC advanced grant.

Susann Huschke (Queen's University Belfast, UK & Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

In my research, I focus on migration and health, specifically, on health care for marginalized groups in Europe, including undocumented migrants and sex workers. My doctoral thesis dealt with the illness experiences of undocumented Latin American migrants in Berlin. I have worked with a Berlin-based NGO that organizes health care for uninsured migrants and engages in lobbying and campaigning for migrants' rights and equal access to health care. In my postdoctoral project, I will investigate the health-seeking strategies of mobile sex workers in Northern Ireland and the effects of criminalization and stigmatization on their well-being. On a theoretical level, I am particularly interested in understanding how various forms of insecurity and exclusion shape people's illness experiences and health outcomes in different local and social settings.

Dominik Mattes (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

Before starting my doctorate I worked in an applied setting. As a project coordinator in a health promotion project for refugees and asylum seekers I organized health related activities, provided health counselling, functioned as a connecting link between refugees and public health and other authorities, and engaged in a roundtable on health care delivery for undocumented migrants. Since late 2008 I’ve been pursuing my PhD project at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. My research focuses on antiretroviral treatment (ART) for HIV/AIDS in Tanzania. The project examines institutional practices and power dynamics of treatment enrolment at hospitals and health centers. It also explores the lived experiences and moral concerns of patients struggling to incorporate the life-prolonging drugs into their everyday routines and to adhere to the strict treatment regime for a lifetime. With regard to the Summer School I am particularly interested in discussing the generation of the multiple forms of inequalities through transnational health policy and standardized implementation procedures in local settings as well as the researcher’s own positioning in this conflictive field concerning both her/his emotional involvement and practical/political engagement.

Claire Beaudevin (CNRS/Cermes3, Villejuif/Paris, France)

My current research focuses on the social stakes of medical genetics and genomics, mostly in Arabia (Sultanate of Oman, United Arab Emirates) but also online (direct-to-consumer genetic testing) and in France (cancer genomics). My MA thesis dealt with the integration of obstetrical ultrasound in the very recent Omani healthcare system. Then, my doctoral thesis (2010) dealt with the political and social stakes of inherited blood disorders (sickle-cell anaemia and beta-thalassaemia) in Oman. Addressing hereditary disorders, this work of course broached reproductive choices but also the local construction and representations of genetic knowledge and its clinical uses as well as transnational health seeking routes and national identity building. I have worked in Oman with members of one of the country’s rare patient associations, especially in the context of their discussions with the Ministry of Health, prior to the implementation of a national mandatory screening policy for inherited blood disorders. I am now adding “the lab to the clinic” and work on the construction of human genetic research in the Arabian Peninsula since 2012. I will also start in Sept. 2013 a multidisciplinary project with Catherine Bourgain (geneticist at Inserm/Cermes3) that will investigate the recent implementation of a national network of cancer genomics centres in France and patients’ experience about this 'genomicization' of their disease.
I am very interested in combinating medical anthropology and anthropology of science when exploring the ways patients, families, health practitioners and researchers create and navigate the highly technologized world of genetics, wherever they are.
In France and in Oman, free healthcare (paid by redistributed taxes or by oil benefits) is supposed to be the norm. However, its universality is only theoretical in France and my work in Arabia takes place in an authoritarian monarchy that hosts (and bases a major part of its economy on) more than 25% of migrant workers (mainly male labourers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) who have extremely limited access to healthcare. Besides, association are actually forbidden in Oman, if not affiliated to a Ministry. I am thus particularly interested in the comparative insights that the summer school participants may provide about the various local meanings of ‘citizenship’ when it comes to seeking health.

Katerina Vidner Ferkov (University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia)

My main research interest is exploring gender politics from the perspective of cultural and medical anthropology. While studying at the University of Ljubljana (BA, MA), I was researching the influences of Catholic, socialist and consumerist paradigms on the construction of female identity in ex-Yugoslavia in the time of transition from socialism to neo-liberal economy. My doctoral research at the University of Nova Gorica involved participant observation of women who use complementary and alternative medicine in Slovenia. I was also employed by an NGO, funded by the European Union and aiming to empower civil society to voice their rights in the biomedical context. As a project manager at this institution I was communicating and preparing outlines for health policy strategies. Currently, my research focus is on online health activists groups. Most recently I have been exploring the failed family legislation in Slovenia, a project which included analyzing online material and meeting online activists. I am working also as a journalist and I try to promote the anthropological perspective not only in academia but also in the media, which may result in an active response from civil society.
  

Ursula Probst (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

I am currently finishing my fieldwork for my MA thesis in anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin. In my research I focused on service provision for and information networks of female sex workers in Berlin. I was particularly interested in how sex workers acquire job-related information and how they evaluate local services for sex workers. For my research I also cooperated with a local sex worker’s NGO.
My fieldwork raised a lot of questions that I would maybe like to address in further research. I yet have only very general ideas on what such a research could be about, so I want to use the Summer School as an opportunity to get some input on topics like stigmatization, marginalization, and migration in connection to health and well-being. As I perceived sex work as strongly disputed topic, I’m also very interested in discussions about the positioning and (political) engagement of researchers in the field.

Kristine Krause (Max Planck Institute for Socio-Cultural Diversity, Germany)

Kristine Krause is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen. Next to finishing various publication projects she is currently developing new research on the ageing body in transnational medical opportunity spaces and categories of difference in care relations. Kristine received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her thesis was based on fieldwork with migrants from Ghana in London and focused on how legal status, transnational networks and religious practices play out in what people do when they are sick. She was particularly interested in how transnational connections play out in therapeutic trajectories, a focus she wants to develop further. Her general research interests include political subjectivities and health, transnational care relations and therapy networks, the intersections of medicine and religion, and global Pentecostalism. In the past Kristine has conducted fieldwork in Ghana, UK and Germany. In Ghana she conducted fieldwork in a psychiatric clinic and in Christian healing camps and has written on how Pentecostal Christians combine medical treatment with healing through the Holy Spirit. She also worked as a research fellow in a project on transnational networks, religion and new migration that was funded by the German Research Foundation. In the framework of that project she did research in the transnational networks of these churches in Germany and Ghana. The project was based at the Department of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where she has also taught as an associate lecturer. Kristine is the co-editor of African diaspora. Journal of Transnational Africa in a Global World http://www.brill.nl/afdi. Next to her academic work, she worked for years as an assistant to severely physically challenged people and taught German lessons in asylum seekers homes.