Brown-bag Discussion: "Im/migrant Health during Anti-Immigrant Times: Using Ethnography to Document Experiences of Mobile Populations in the US Southeast"
Brown-bag Discussion: "Im/migrant Health during Anti-Immigrant Times: Using Ethnography to Document Experiences of Mobile Populations in the US Southeast"
The Center for the History of the New America is proud to host Thurka Sangaramoorthy, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, for our second brown-bag discussion of the spring semester. Dr. Sangaramoorthy will discuss using rapid and traditional ethnographic methods to document the complex relations between unauthorized migrant labor, mobility, and structural and social vulnerability, and in particular, the experiences of im/migrant populations in HIV/AIDS public health prevention efforts. Using ethnographic research conducted with health and social service providers working with Latino migrant workers and sex workers in rural North Carolina and with Haitians and HIV/AIDS experts in Miami, the talk will highlight the diversity of im/migrant experiences in HIV/AIDS prevention and document the health needs of mobile populations more broadly. Findings will be used to discuss practical implications for HIV/STD prevention, including calling on public health institutions and practitioners to incorporate the concept of mobility as an organizing principle for the delivery of health care services.
Please let us know if you plan to attend by RSVPing on Facebook or emailing us at newamerica@umd.edu.
Thurka Sangaramoorthy is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland--College Park. Dr. Sangaramoorthy is a medical anthropologist who works in applied public health, and for over 10 years, she has worked in the fields of sexual health and STD/HIV prevention with vulnerable and at-risk populations in international non-profits, state and local health departments, academic institutions and governmental agencies. Dr. Sangaramoorthy's first book, Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers, 2014) documents in detail HIV/AIDS prevention programs and their effects on the health and well-being of Haitians in South Florida, a transnational immigrant community long plagued by the stigma of being AIDS carriers, to chronicle how medical, epidemiological, and social constructions of HIV/AIDS link pathology to racial, ethnic, and immigrant identities.