Columbia University Conference on Health in Central Asia

[Tanah Spencer]

The Culture, Religion, and Communications Unit of the
Global Health Research Center of Central Asia at Columbia University
Presents its First Annual Conference:

Healing Paradigms and the Politics of Health in Central Asia
Kellogg Center, Columbia University
420 West 118th Street, 15th floor
April 8, 2011

PLEASE RSVP TO:
https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/register.php?eventID=48012

9:00-9:40
Breakfast (provided for participants & audience)

9:45-9:50
Welcome:  Allen Zweben, Associate Dean, Columbia University School of 
Social Work

9:50-10:00
Introductory Remarks: Valentina Izmirlieva, Director of the Culture, Religion, 
and Communications Unit, Global Health Research Center of Central Asia

10:00-11:15
Key-Note Lecture: Salmaan Keshavjee (Harvard University), "Bleeding Babies 
in Badakhshan: The Political Economy of Culture and Illness"

11:15-11:30
Coffee Break

11:30-1:15
Panel I: Healing Paradigms: Biomedicine and Its Ethno-Religious Alternatives
Presenters:
Devin DeWeese (Indiana University), "The Locus of Healing in Islamic Central 
Asia: Shrines, Sufism, 'Shamanism,' and the Boundaries of Religion"
Danuta Penkala-Gawecka (Adam Mickiewicz University), "Mentally Ill or 
Chosen by Spirits? Illness Concepts and the Revival of Spiritual Healing in 
Post-Soviet Kazakhstan"
Jeff Sahadeo (Carleton University), "Cholera and Colonialism in Central Asia: 
The Tashkent Riot of 1892"
Respondent:
Paula Michaels (University of Iowa)

1:15-2:30
Lunch (provided for participants & audience)

2:30-4:15
Panel II: The Politics of (Global) Health: Intervention, Control, and Institutional 
Power
Presenters:
Alisher Latypov (University College London), "The Opium War at the 'Roof of 
the World': The Administration of Addiction in Soviet Badakhshan"
Erica Johnson (University of North Carolina), "Health Care as a Tool of 
Authoritarian Survival in post-Soviet Central Asia"
Erin  Koch (University of Kentucky), "Illness, Marginalization, and Global 
Health Interventions in Post-Soviet Eurasia"
Respondent:
Richard Elovich (Columbia)

4:15-4:45
Closing Remarks: Valentina Izmirlieva (Columbia)

4:45-6:00
Reception

Conference Participants:

Devin DeWeese is a Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies 
at Indiana University. His research interests include Islamic Central Asia, 
Soviet Central Asia, Sufism, Islamization, religions and Inner Asia, and Islamic 
hagiography, and he has recently taught courses on religion and power in 
Islamic Central Asia, Islam in the Soviet Union and its successor states, and 
on the Islamic hagiography of Central Asia. Among his publications is the book 
Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde:  Baba Tükles and 
Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvania State 
University Press, 1994 Series "Hermeneutics:  Studies in the History of 
Religions").

Richard Elovich, a research scientist at the Insitute for Social and Economic 
Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University, holds a Ph.D. in medical 
sociology and a Masters in Public Health. He is a specialist in policy and 
program development on HIV/AIDS and substance use with over fifteen years 
experience in the U.S. and internationally. Since 2003, he has led needs 
assessments and developed HIV programs for international donors, UN 
agencies, and non-governmental organizations throughout the former Soviet 
Union and Asia, with a particular focus on most at risk populations.

Erica Johnson is Lecturer and Director of Master's Studies in Global Studies at 
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Her research and teaching 
interests are in comparative politics and political economy, with particular 
focus on post-Soviet state-society relations.  Before joining the UNC faculty, 
Erica was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University's Center for 
Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies.  She holds an MA (2005) and 
PhD (2009) in Political Science from University of Washington in Seattle and 
an MA (1997) in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies from UW.

Salmaan Keshavjee received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Middle Eastern 
Studies from Harvard in 1998 and his MD from Stanford in 2001. Dr. 
Keshavjee is now an Assistant Professor in Social Medicine and in Medicine at 
the Harvard Medical School and a Physician in the Division of Global Health 
Equity at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. He conducted doctoral research 
in medical anthropology at Harvard University on the health transition in post-
Soviet Tajikistan. He currently works with the Division of Global Health Equity 
and Partners In Health on the implementation of a multidrug-resistant TB 
treatment program in Tomsk, Russia, and a program to treat patients co-
infected with HIV and multidrug- resistant TB in Lesotho.

Erin Koch is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the 
University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching interests include 
postsocialism, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and 
global health and humanitarianism. Koch?s prior research in the Republic of 
Georgia examined the effects of Soviet collapse on tuberculosis and responses 
to tuberculosis in Georgia. Her current research in Georgia investigates health 
effects of war and displacement, medical interventions, and politics of care.

Alisher Latypov, MA (Tajik State National University), MHS (Johns Hopkins 
University), MA (University College London) is a PhD student at the Wellcome 
Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. His doctoral thesis is entitled 
"The Administration of Addiction: The Politics of Medicine and Opiate Use in 
Soviet Tajikistan, 1924-1958." He has also served in the Tajik Presidential 
Drug Control Agency, directed the country office of Global Initiative on 
Psychiatry in Tajikistan and assisted UNDP as Sub-Regional Drug Epidemiology 
Expert for Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He is a corresponding 
member of the Reference Group to the United Nations on HIV and Injecting 
Drug Use and has published broadly on the politics of health and healing in 
Central Asia.

Paula Michaels is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. 
She is the author of Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin?s Central 
Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), winner of the Association of 
Women in Slavic Studies? Heldt Prize and a finalist for the PEN Center USA 
Literary Award. Michaels has published numerous articles on the history of 
medicine, women's history, and film history. With funding from the 
Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the NIH, she is currently working on an 
international history of the Lamaze method of childbirth.

Danuta Penkala-Gawecka is Professor of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology 
at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. She is currently the Deputy 
Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. Her areas of 
expertise include medical anthropology and Central Asian studies. She 
conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Poland. Her interests 
focus on medical pluralism, traditional and complementary/alternative 
medicines in Central Asia and the connections between medicine and religion. 
She published books: Traditional Medicine in Afghanistan and its 
Transformations, Wrocaw 1988; Complementary Medicine in Kazakhstan: The 
Force of Tradition and the Pressure of Globalisation, Poznan 2006. She is 
editor of the oldest Polish ethnological journal "Lud" founded in 1895.

Jeff Sahadeo is an Associate Professor of Political Science and European & 
Russian Studies at Carleton University. He received his Ph. D. from the 
Universityp of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His teaching interests include 
diaspora, migration, and empire in Eastern Europe and Asia. He also works on 
issues of colonialism, nationality, frontiers, and borders in relations of power 
and the creation of identities and states. A specialist on Central Asia, Dr. 
Sahadeo has conducted extensive work in Uzbekistan. He also teaches courses 
on the eastwards expansion of the European Union. Dr. Sahadeo's current 
research focuses on issues of migration and interethnic contact between Asian 
populations of the (former) Soviet Union and majority Russians in the cities of 
Leningrad/ St. Petersburg and Moscow in the post World War II era.

For more information: http://ghrcca.columbia.edu/en/node/118 or email 
crc2011conference at gmail.com

Please RSVP to: https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/register.php?
eventID=48012

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