1st Place Winner

Rebecca M. Bedwell

University of Arizona

Diabetes Illness Narratives among Mexican Immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region.

Rebecca Bedwell is a Ph.D. student in sociocultural anthropology, with a concentration in medical anthropology, in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include medical anthropology, feminist anthropology, women’s health, migration, illness narratives, structural inequality, health disparities, and risk. She received her B.A. in Anthropology and Spanish at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2014, and her M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona in 2017. Her M.A. thesis, entitled Diabetes Illness Narratives among Mexican Immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico Border Region, investigated experiences of type 2 diabetes among Mexican immigrants living in Tucson, Arizona, with a specific focus on conceptualizations of risk, heritability, individual responsibility, and experiences of emotion. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2017-2022).

2nd Place Winner

Nora Colleen Bridges

University of Pittsburgh

From “Biodiversity Hotspot” to “Socio-Environmental Hope Spot”: Making Wellbeing Central to Sustainable Development in Upper Amazonia.”

3rd Place Winner

Colleen Walsh Lang

Washington University in St. Louis

NGO Responsibilization: Landscapes of Need and Islands of Care for Children Living with HIV in Uganda.

Colleen Walsh Lang is currently enrolled in the MD/PhD program at Washington University in St. Louis.  For her doctoral dissertation, titled “Vulnerable Agents: Ugandan Children’s Experiences with HIV-Rehabilitation and Reintegration,” she conducted 15 months of fieldwork in east-central Uganda at a long-term residential treatment center for children living with HIV.  In this setting Colleen studied the ways the processes of medicalization and responsibilization interact in sometimes surprising ways. Her research emphasizes the tensions between children’s vulnerability and children’s (at times destructive) agency, between sustainable development paradigms which emphasize responsibility and patronage networks of interdependence, and between the biomedical and social meanings of food and health. Overall, in sharing children’s experiences living with HIV in Uganda, she seeks to emphasize the complexity of their lives, to write against sustainable development rhetoric which privileges independence over interdependence, and to hold both children’s vulnerability and their agency in frame simultaneously.  Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Student Fellowship, the Lambda Alpha Graduate Research Grant, the Medical Student Award from the HIV Medical Association, and the Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.  She is currently completing her clinical rotations at Washington University School of Medicine.  In 2018-2019 she will complete a fellowship in clinical medical ethics at the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.