The Lancet Cases in Global Social Medicine

Project Leads

Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on social hierarchies, health inequalities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted. He is the Chancellor's Professor (2022 - 2025) in the UC Berkeley Division of Society and Environment and Researcher and PI of ERC FOODCIRCUITS: Hidden Connections Between Migrants and Societies at the University of Barcelona and the ICREA Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Study.  He is a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Medical Anthropology and affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the School of Public Health.  He is Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UCSF and UC Berkeley, Founder of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Director of the Hub for Global Social Medicine in Barcelona.

Mayssa Rekhis is an anthropologist and medical doctor who earned her M.D. from the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia, and her Ph.D. from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. She is a researcher, educator, and artist working at the intersection of these roles, with a focus on health, social justice, and migration. She has taught at Sorbonne Paris Nord University and the School for International Political Studies at Paris-Est Créteil University, and previously held a faculty position at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she served as Director of the Master’s Programme in Global Health. She has more than a decade of experience working in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), East Africa, and Europe, both as a researcher and practitioner, with a focus on sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as mental health. As a researcher, she explores human experiences of extreme violence, trauma, suffering, and exile, and is interested in the roles of psychiatry and psychotherapy, alongside the mechanisms and processes of subjectivation. Her practice is grounded in interdisciplinarity and collaborations that question, scrutinize, and reimagine borders within—and of—health, healthcare, and healing.

Mirko Pasquini, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg and affiliated researcher at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Uppsala University. His research interests combine hospital ethnography and primary care in Italy and Sweden, with a focus on health inequalities, healthcare governance, the social dynamics of attention, violence, trust and mistrust in care interactions. Mirko’s current research project, “Mistrust in practice: an ethnography of suspicion in general medical practice in the aftermath of COVID-19”, funded by the Swedish Research Council, contributes to debates about the “crisis of trust” in the healthcare sector looking at Italy in the aftermath of COVID-19. Mirko’s Ph.D. work “The Negotiation of Urgency: Economies of Attention in an Italian Emergency Room”, was awarded the annual Westinska Prize (2021) for outstanding dissertation by the Royal Society of Humanists at Uppsala University. A revised version of the book will be published by Rutgers University Press. To promote the application of critical social science concepts within medicine, Mirko is engaged in health workers’ training in “Structural Competency” in Sweden, Denmark and Italy. He is also part of the Applied Health Club of the Applied Anthropology Network.

Scott Stonington is a medical and cultural anthropologist, and an internal medicine physician. His research broadly addresses the globalization of biomedical ethics and expertise. His first project in this area focused on decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where individuals face a complex combination of ethical frameworks generated by high-tech medical care, human-rights politics, and the metaphysical demands of dying. Dr. Stonington spent two years accompanying Thai elders at their deathbeds, documenting their children’s attempts to pay back their “debt of life” via intensive medical care, as well as the ensuing “spirit ambulance,” a rush to get patients on life-support home at the last possible moment to orchestrate the final breath in a spiritually advantageous place.  Dr. Stonington’s second project in this area focuses on global debates over the use of opiates for pain management. Dr. Stonington’s secondary research agenda addresses medical epistemology in the U.S., specifically how health practitioners decide what constitutes true and/or useful knowledge and how this affects patients.  This work grows out of his ongoing practice as an Internal Medicine physician, both in the hospital and in primary care.

Luke Messac is an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed residency training in emergency medicine at Rhode Island Hospital. His research focuses on the history and political economy of health care finance in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. His work has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, and other leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of No More to Spend: Neglect and the Construction of Scarcity in Malawi’s History of Health Care (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2023). He serves on the board of Dollar For, a nonprofit that helps low-income patients obtain hospital financial assistance.

Eugene Raikhel is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. He is particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. His work follows therapeutic technologies as they move both from "bench to bedside" and from one cultural or institutional setting to another, examining how they intersect with the lives of practitioners and patients. Professor Raikhel's book, "Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic" examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and addiction in Russia over the past twenty years. Two new projects, both based largely in North America, are in an earlier stage of development. The first examines the emerging field of "behavioral epigenetics," with a particular focus on research about suicidal risk. The second will examine how contemporary logics, practices and politics of mental health and illness intersect with class distinctions and aspirations for upward mobility among undergraduates in the United States.

Junko Kitanaka is a professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Human Sciences at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Her book Depression in Japan: psychiatric cures for a society in distress (2012, Princeton University Press) has won five awards including the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize in 2013. The book has been translated into French, Japanese, Persian and Korean (and parts of it in Chinese). She has been featured in global media including New York Times, The New Yorker, and BBC, CNN, and Danish, German, and French national TV. She is a member of Japan’s Science Council and has served on numerous journal editorial boards including BioSocieties, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Cultural Anthropology. Her articles include: “The social in psychiatries,” with Ecks, S. and Wu. H. Lancet, 28 May 2021; “Depression.” Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, with S. Ecks. 2021, and “Depression as a Problem of Labor,” Sadness or Depression?, J. Wakefield & S. Demazeux eds. Springer, 2016. Her work on dementia, preventive psychiatry, and the neuropsychiatrization of the lifecycle has appeared as “In the Mind of Dementia,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34(1), 2020, which has been translated into Spanish.  

Valéria Macedo is an anthropologist and professor at the Federal University of São Paulo since 2011, where she coordinates a training course for teachers belonging to indigenous peoples in Brazil. Since 2005, she has been working in partnership with communities of the Guarani Mbya people in the State of São Paulo and has conducted research in medical centers focused on indigenous people. She is co-editor of the books “Nas redes guarani: saberes, traduções e transformações” (In the Guarani networks: knowledge, translations, and transformations) and “Povos Indígenas entre Olhares” (Indigenous Peoples between Perspectives), as well as several articles in scientific journals and other publications.

Paola M. Sesia, PhD and MPH, is a researcher and professor at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico. She is a medical anthropologist and public health specialist with a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Arizona, Tucson and a Master's in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research interests focus on maternal, newborn, and reproductive health (including prenatal and obstetric care quality, professional and traditional midwifery, obstetric violence and access to abortion and abortion care), maternal mortality, health policies and Indigenous peoples in Mexico. She works from a reproductive rights, human rights, and Indigenous collective rights perspectives, as well as from a social justice, structural vulnerabilities, and social inequalities theoretical approaches.

Carlos Piñones Rivera holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Catalonia). He is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Universidad de Tarapacá (Chile) and faculty member in its PhD programs in Social Sciences and Psychology. He has been a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and guest editor for Health and Human Rights (Harvard) and Global Public Health (Columbia). His research addresses indigenous peoples’ health, intercultural health, migrant health, and health mobility. He is principal investigator of the project SARNAQAÑA: Mobility, Economy and Rituality of Andean Medical Knowledge in the Far North of Chile and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, supervised by Dr. Jaime Breilh.

Tinashe Goronga is a medical doctor and public and global health specialist committed to social justice and health equity. He serves as a community organiser with EqualHealth’s Campaign Against Racism, a movement of health professionals, students, academics, and communities working to address the health impacts of structural racism. He is a member of the Social Medicine Consortium and co-founder of the Centre for Health Equity Zimbabwe, a network of health professionals advancing social medicine education and the climate and health nexus. Tinashe is also a Commissioner for The Lancet Global Health Commission on People-Centered Care for Universal Health Coverage, an Emerging Voices for Global Health Fellow, and co-Vice Chair of the Health Systems Global Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Health Systems Thematic Working Group (Climate TWG).

Salmaan Keshavjee, MD, PhD, ScM, is Director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Global Health Delivery and Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (DGHSM) at Harvard Medical School. He is also Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. With advanced training in both medicine and anthropology, Dr. Keshavjee is a leading expert in drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment and the anthropology of health policy. He is the author of Blind Spot: How neoliberalism infiltrated global health, which is based on his doctoral research in Central Asia (Tajikistan). He has worked extensively with the Boston-based non-profit Partners In Health (PIH) on the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Benson A. Mulemi (PhD, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) is an Associate Professor of (Medical) Anthropology from Kenya and currently a Research Associate at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa. He was Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He has served as a member of the Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Advisory Group Committee and evaluation expert with the European Research Executive Agency. He was awarded post-doctoral visiting fellowship at Cambridge University in the Centre of African Studies and virtual fellowship at Leeds University in the Centre of African Studies/ Arts and Humanities Research Institute. His publications include contributions in: Routledge Handbook of Spirituality, Religion, and the Medical Humanities, the Encyclopaedia of Psychology and Religion, African Folklore: An Encyclopaedia; Pursuing Justice in Africa: Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices, Encyclopaedia of African Thought; African Medical Pluralism, The Human Enhancement Debate and Disability, Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa; and Anthropologies of Cancer in Transnational Worlds.

Dr. Margareta (Magda) Matache is a Lecturer on Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the co-founder and Director of the Roma Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. She is also a member of the Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health. Her research focuses on the manifestations and impacts of racism and other systems of oppression in different geographical and political contexts. Her research examines the structural and social determinants of health and their nexus with historical contexts and contemporary public policies, with a particular focus on anti-Roma racism.

Sir Michael Marmot is a world-renowned epidemiologist and Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity. After earning his medical degree in Sydney, he completed a PhD at UC Berkeley, where he began investigating how social environments shape physical health. He is best known for the Whitehall Studies, which revealed the "social gradient"—the link between lower social status and poorer health. Marmot chaired the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health and authored the influential Marmot Review. There are now over 60 Marmot places. Knighted in 2000 and made a Companion of Honour in 2023, he remains a leading global voice arguing that social justice is vital for public health.