Anthropology in Action

In recent years, there have been positive changes to the health research landscape, with increasing interest amongst community organisations and university investigators in establishing research partnerships and with more funding opportunities for community-engaged work. However, creating a community–university partnership requires new skills, new types of knowledge, and new ways of creating and maintaining relationships. On both sides of the research equation, people are looking for guidance. The discussion here uses our experience to offer concrete tips in plain language for strategies that can be used to build capacity for community–university partnerships for organisations and researchers in pre-partnership and early partnership stages. We comment on debates about epistemology and knowledge production in research and how anthropologists are well positioned to contribute to this process.

Scholarship and advocacy work regarding reproductive health have often focused on women’s experiences. Concerns about men’s sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) have historically been on the margins in this context. In the United States, young men are at the greatest risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), yet are the least likely to seek SRH. Based on research with 18 healthcare providers in a large public Florida university clinic, we examined providers’ perspectives about expanding men’s SRH provision and utilisation. Research findings demonstrate inconsistent provider strategies in treating men’s SRH needs and a clinical environment that has low expectations of men receiving preventive care, further perpetuating the placement of SRH responsibility upon women. This article contributes to applied and medical anthropology scholarship on health inequalities through its discussion of the challenges and barriers that contribute to poor SRH for young men and the critical role of providers in this context.

This article explores women’s reactions to public health nutrition work in Guatemala, looking specifically at multi-micronutrients, or sprinkles. This anthropological research was carried out in two rural communities in Chiquimula, one of which was in the Maya Ch’orti’ region, during the 2017 seasonal period of scarcity. Taking as a starting point the limitations of a medicalised approach to malnutrition, this article discusses how multi-micronutrients are ill-suited as a solution for child malnutrition in situations of precarity. Though they are designed to be physiologically effective in reducing nutrition deficiencies in the body, they appear less useful once socio-economic conditions are considered. Women’s experience with malnutrition emergencies will be explored to show how health decision-making must be understood in relation to their social context as well as to their expectations for the future.

In May 2018, the European Union (EU) introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with the aim of increasing transparency in data processing and enhancing the rights of data subjects. Within anthropology, concerns have been raised about how the new legislation will affect ethnographic fieldwork and whether the laws contradict the discipline’s core tenets. To address these questions, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London hosted an event on 25 May 2018 entitled ‘Is Anthropology Legal?’, bringing together researchers and data managers to begin a dialogue about the future of anthropological work in the context of the GDPR. In this article, I report and reflect on the event and on the possible implications for anthropological research within this climate of increasing governance.

Anthropology in Action is always happy to hear from potential reviewers at all stages in their academic careers. We currently have a number of books awaiting review. If you are interested in reviewing any of the books on the list below, please contact the reviews editor David Orr (d.orr@sussex.ac.uk). We welcome reviews of around 600 words for a single book, but we are also keen to include review articles comparing two or more works, for which the word length is negotiable. Please also be aware that we can request recent publications (within the last year) from publishers, so do feel free to let us know of any books that you would like to review within the field of applied anthropology, and we will do our best to get them for you. Also note that publishers routinely send pdf or e-copies of publications rather than hard copies.