The Cascadia Seminar: Ethnographic Adventures in Medical Anthropology

Date: April 24, 2015

In conjunction with the 2015 Cascadia Seminar in Medical Anthropology, Mette Nordahl Svendsen will give a public lecture about her research project, "A Life Worth Living: Negotiating Life Worthiness in Human and Animal." Svendsen is Associate Professor in the Medical Science & Technology Studies program, in the School of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). For this project, funded by a prestigious Sapere Aude grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research, Svendsen directs a small team of researchers exploring--through ethnographic research in laboratories, care homes, and clinics--how the "life worthiness" is enacted, conceptualized, and contested in practice, for experimental research animals and the fragile humans (premature infants and dementia sufferers) for whom these animals serve as models. 

This public lecture will serve as the keynote address for the third iteration of the Cascadia Seminar, a conference organized collaboratively by medical anthropologists at a number of institutions in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia (the Cascadia region), which will be hosted April 25-26 at Seattle University. The Cascadia Seminar is designed to be a small, intimate, high-interest, low-cost weekend conference, organized with the goals of showcasing excellent work in medical anthropology, developing a new and different kind of intellectual space for medical anthropology, building intellectual community among faculty and graduate students in the Pacific Northwest region, and establishing our region as a place known for exciting scholarly events.