Event Date
Complicated Empathy in Clinical Ethnography:
Vulnerability, Care, and Doing Ethical Work when the Whole Self Shows Up
As an ethnographer, a clinician, and a former eating disorder patient, my recent research in an American eating disorders clinic raised a number of ethical quandaries, none of which had a straightforward resolution. In navigating them, techniques of empathy, vulnerability, and care became invaluable tools in my methodological toolbox. But these were not clean and easy developments. They were difficult, sometimes painful, and almost always uncertain. And they threw into relief a number of issues rarely discussed in anthropological or clinical domains regarding how we (attempt to) feel our way into the lives of others as the foundation for building certain kinds of knowledge, and the potential risks inherent in this practice, for others and for ourselves. In this talk, I reflect on these experiences and set out a number of guiding principles for doing ethical engaged research.
Dr. Rebecca J. Lester is a Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis with research interests in mental health, gender and sexuality, and religion. She is also a practicing psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, trauma, personality disorders, mood disorders, and gender/sexuality issues. Her most recent book, Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (2019) was awarded a Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry and president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.
For more information, please contact: Priscilla A. Cordova
Event sponsored by Sociocultural Anthropology