When:
Monday, November 2, 2020
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM CT
Where: Online
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Contact:
Janet Hundrieser
(847) 491-3525
Group: Science in Human Culture Program - Klopsteg Lecture Series
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Speaker
Sokhieng Au
Title
"An Academic Among the Aid Workers: Bridging Public Health Practice and Academic Expertise"
Abstract
In my fifteen years of working professionally as both a humanistic scholar of medicine and a public health analyst, I have often confronted the challenge of how to do both tasks well—and simultaneously. In theory, the two approaches would seem to have much synergistic potential to improve the health and wellbeing of the most vulnerable populations in this world, but in practice they remain largely irrelevant to each other. And yet, the grass always seems browner on the other side of that disciplinary divide. In our discussion/conversation, I will trace my unconventional career trajectory between the university and the humanitarian aid community in the U.S., Belgium, Guadeloupe, Cambodia, and now Iowa…, and offer some personal reflections on boundary work, bridge building, and the rather cumbersome idea of "operationalizing" academic theory.
Biography
Sokhieng Au is currently Interim Director of the Global Health Studies Program at the University of Iowa. She teaches and researches on global circulations, exchanges, and inequities in humanitarian aid, medical expertise, and cultural and professional values around medicine. She has also worked in international humanitarian aid, most notably with Médecins Sans Frontières. Her published research ranges from a monograph on French colonial medicine in Cambodia to an edited volume on the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic.