Each year the Department of Anthropology presents the Kassen Lecture. Generously supported by Drs. Aileen and Julian Kassen, the lectureship invites a top female scholar in the social sciences to the department to present a lecture to the campus community. In addition to the lecture, anthropology graduate students have the opportunity to meet with the Kassen Lecturer in a small group discussion.
Margaret Lock
Marjorie Bronfman Professor in Social Studies in Medicine
Department of Anthropology, McGill University
LECTURE TITLE: "The Alzheimer Enigma amidst Global Aging"
Monday, October 15, 2012
Mather Memorial, Room 201
4:00 -5:00 PM
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Margaret Lock is the Marjorie Bronfman Professor Emerita in Social Studies in Medicine, and is affiliated with the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officier de L’Ordre national du Québec, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Lock was awarded the Prix Du Québec, domaine Sciences Humaines in 1997 and in the same year the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain. In 2002 she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize and in 2005 the Canada Council for the Arts Killam Prize. She was also awarded a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship in 2005 and named a Grande Montréalaise, Secteur Social. Lock participated in the CBC radio program Ideas that ran between 2007 and 2008 entitled “How to Think About Science.” In 2008 she received the Career Achievement Award of the Society of Medical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, and in 2011 she was appointed as an Honorary Member of the Golden Key International Honor Society, and received The McGill Medal for Exceptional Academic Achievement.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Margaret Lock’s research focuses on a comparative anthropology of medicine and biomedical technologies. Lock initially researched the 20th century revival of the indigenous Japanese medical system that continues to proliferate to the present day. She has also carried out ethnographic inquiries into adolescence, female mid life, and old age in Japan. Her book Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America, published in 1993 by the University of California Press, won six prizes including the Staley Prize of the School of American Research, the Canada-Japan Book Prize, and the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In 2002 the University of California Press published Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, also an award-winning book. This volume documents professional and public disputes in Japan and North America about the recognition of brain death as the end of human life in order that organs can be legally procured for transplant. A book written together with Vinh-Kim Nguyen that examines the global impact of biomedical technologies, entitled An Anthropology of Medicine, was published in 2010 by Wiley-Blackwells. This book has been awarded the American Publishers Association's 2010 PROSE award for Archeology and Anthropology. Lock is currently writing a book tentatively titled Entanglements of Aging and Dementia in the 21st Century.
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PAST LECTURES
1999 / 2000 / 2001 / 2002 / 2003 / 2005 / 2006 / 2007 / 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011
Marcia C. Inhorn (William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University)
LECTURE TITLE: "Global Gametes: Reproductive 'Tourism' and Islamic Bioethics in the High-tech Middle East"
Sarah Lamb (Ph.D., Associate Professor Anthropology, Brandeis University)
LECTURE TITLE: "Abandonment and Freedom: Elder-Care Institutions, Individualizing Subjectivities and the Ethics of Aging in Contemporary India."
Jennifer Furin (M.D., Harvard Medical School, Ph.D., University of California)
Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Medical Director for Partners in Health's (PIH) Progam in Lesotho
LECTURE TITLE: "Anthropologist as Witness; Anthropologist as Advocate: Objectivity and Responsibility in Current Anthropologic Practice"
Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. Research in cognitive anthropology, medical anthropology, research methods, Mesoamerica and northern North America.
LECTURE TITLE: "Enacting Ethos, Enacting Health: Parental Commentary and Everyday Life in a California Family"
Dr. Carol Worthman (Ph.D., Harvard University)
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory for Comparative Biology at Emory University
LECTURE TITLE: "You Can't Always Get What You Want: Cultural Models, Parenting Practices, and Child Development"
Dr. Kathy Oths (Ph.D. Case Western Reserve University)
Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alabama
LECTURE TITLE: "Sociocultural Dimensions of Birth Outcomes: An Anthropological Approach to the Persistent Ethnic Gap"
Dr. Judith Justice (Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley)
Professor of Medical Anthropology and Health Policy at the University of California at San Francisco
LECTURE TITLE: "Volunteering in Poorer Countries: Empowerment or Exploitation?"
Dr. MaryJo DelVecchio Good (Ph.D. Harvard)
Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a teaching faculty member in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University
LECTURE TITLE: "Indonesia Sakit (Indonesia in Pain): Interpretations of States of Crisis by Indonesian Contemporary Artists"
Dr. Carolyn Sargent (Ph.D. Michigan State)
Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University
LECTURE TITLE: "Reproduction, Polygamy and the State: Challenges to Malian Migrants in Paris"
Dr. Shirley Lindenbaum (Ph.D. Hon. New School of Social Research)
Professor of Anthropology in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
LECTURE TITLE: "Thinking about Epidemics: Kuru, Mad Cow and Variant Cretzfeldt Jakob Disease"
Dr. Jean Comaroff (Ph.D. University of London)
Professor of Anthropology and the Social Sciences in the College and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago
LECTURE TITLE: "Alien Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and the State of the South African Postcolony"
Dr. Susan Scrimshaw (Ph.D. Columbia)
Dean of the School of Public Health and Professor of Community Health Sciences and Anthropology at University of Illinois at Chicago. She was formerly in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Dean of Public Health at UCLA.
LECTURE TITLE: "Anthropologists in Public Health: A Time of Opportunity"