Melinda González, born in Newark, New Jersey with ancestral home in Moca, Puerto Rico, is an Afro-Indigenous scholar-activist-poet of Puerto Rican descent. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist, focused on environmental anthropology, whose work maps how disaster is differentially distributed across race, class, and gender. She brings decolonial and indigenous research methods to the study of new media technologies in environmental justice studies. González believes in academic social justice, starting with providing graduate students and contingent faculty with livable wages and access to free medical and mental health care.
D. Kofi Mensah is a medical and cultural anthropologist interested in the social and behavioral aspects of mental health and drug addiction. My research looks at the influence of social dynamics and social structures on mental healthcare systems from a critical medical anthropology perspective. He conducts research in Ghana and the United States.
Beatriz Reyes-Foster is a mestiza scholar and researcher. A cultural and medical anthropologist, her research examines the intersections of health, medicine, and society in a variety of different settings and regions, particularly the ways in which these intersections reproduce health disparities and social inequality. Her research foci include mental health, reproduction, coloniality, and gender. Reyes-Foster has written about coloniality, identity, indigenous personhood and self, cultural constructions of health and illness, and the connections between religion, spiritual beliefs, and biomedicine. You can find her tweeting on @BeatriAnthro.
Erica Hua Fletcher is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles/Veterans Administration’s Center for Excellence in Veteran Resilience and Recovery. Her training is in the medical humanities, with a focus on psychiatric anthropology and social medicine. Her past research investigated contemporary mental health social movements and their impact on public mental health care in the United States, with a special focus on peer-staffed crisis respite centers. Her current research considers the adaptation of a psychiatric service user/survivor-led support group approach at the VA with Veterans who hear voices or have other unusual experiences. She served as AMHIG co-chair from 2018-2021.
Brittany Franck is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology with a concentration in medical anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests center on how experiences of mental disorders and chronicity are shaped by health care institutions, cultural understandings of illness and recovery, and pharmaceutical practices. Her current project concerns how adults living with borderline personality disorder conceptualize and work towards recovery in their everyday lives. Brittany’s previous research explored women’s experiences of reproductive trauma in Ethiopia. Brittany received her master’s in International Development and Global Health Affairs at the University of Denver.
Gerpha Gerlin is a medical anthropology PhD/MPH student & Science in Human Culture Cluster Fellow at Northwestern University. She works on issues related to psychiatric dis-ease and disablement, identity development, knowledge-production economies, and implementation science. Her dissertation will work at the interface of behavioral health and crimina