Anthropology

Valeria Espinosa ’25 Earns SUNY’s McConney EOP Award

rime — Wed, 28 May 2025 19:24:15 +0000

Valeria Espinosa ’25 Earns SUNY’s McConney EOP Award rime Wed, 05/28/2025 - 15:24

Ashley Wright

wrighta — Thu, 15 May 2025 14:14:34 +0000

Ashley Wright

Administrative Assistant

wrighta Thu, 05/15/2025 - 10:14

Bailey 153

(585) 245-5277

wrighta@geneseo.edu

Ashley Wright

wrighta — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:46:12 +0000

Ashley Wright

Administrative Assistant to Anthropology and Geography and Sustainability Studies

wrighta Tue, 04/15/2025 - 10:46

Bailey 153/227

(585) 245-5277/(585) 245-5238

wrighta@geneseo.edu

Meet Students You Help When You Pay It Forward

dreessen — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:55:33 +0000

Meet Students You Help When You Pay It Forward dreessen Wed, 03/26/2025 - 09:55

A New Start for Himself and Others

dreessen — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:53:24 +0000

A New Start for Himself and Others dreessen Wed, 03/26/2025 - 09:53

The Woman is the Active Agent: General Practitioners and the Agentive Displacement of abortion in Ireland

patenaude — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 16:44:10 +0000

The Woman is the Active Agent: General Practitioners and the Agentive Displacement of abortion in Ireland

Monday, January 27, 2025

patenaude Mon, 01/27/2025 - 11:44

Assistant professor of anthropology Brenna McCaffrey

Brenna McCaffrey

Summary

When abortion is performed via medication rather than a procedure, doctors feel differently about their role in the process

Abstract

After the legalization of abortion in 2018, Ireland needed clinicians to become abortion providers and make this political win a medical reality. Yet Irish doctors had next-to-no training in abortion care, and barriers ranging from stigma to economic pressures in the healthcare system impacted doctors’ desire to volunteer. How did hundreds of Irish doctors make the shift from family doctor to abortion provider? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2020, this article explores the process by which Irish general practitioners became abortion providers, attending to the material impact of medical technologies on that journey. Drawing from medical anthropologists who have examined similar themes of agency, pharmaceuticals, and medico-legal frameworks within the topic of assisted dying, I build on Anita Hannig's idea of “agentive displacement” to frame the productive impact of abortion pills on this transition.

Main research questions

When a country legalizes a previously unavailable and stigmatized medical procedure, how do they get their doctors to opt in to become providers?
How is a medical procedure different when it is a pill vs. a procedure?

What was already known?

As of 2020, over 50% of all abortions in the United States used medication, and that number continues to climb. In Ireland after legalization of abortion, estimates indicate over 98% of legal abortions took place in the first 12 weeks, where abortions are always done using pills unless there are medical reasons a patient cannot use them (see HSE, 2022). When medical processes that once required physical interactions now include pills that work with or without a provider's intervention, the roles and perception of responsibility of those involved change. For example, with the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention, the focus on behavioral interventions (i.e., condom use) shifted to include the role of a medication, distributing the responsibility of “safe-sex” from the individuals to the individual, their provider, and their pills (Thomann, 2018). It required potential PrEP patients to think of themselves as people perpetually “at-risk” due to their behaviors and desires, rather than people who sometimes engage in a behavior that is defined as “risky” (Brisson, 2017). While research on pharmaceuticals and subjectivity have often focused on this impact on patients, I hypothesized that these shifts also affected how medical professionals perceive their role in the provision of care.

Novel methodology

Ethnographic research and interviews with doctors

Implications for society

Relevant to on-going debates about abortion in the U.S., where medication abortion now makes up over 50% of abortions and where access to these very medications is now under threat.

Implications for research

One silver lining to the threat against medication abortion in the U.S. is that more people are paying attention to it. More research is now being done on the social implications of medical practices, for example, people who access medication outside of the formal healthcare system.

Funding

NSF 1947249

McCaffrey, Brenna. 2024. The woman is the active agent: General practitioners and the agentive displacement of abortion in Ireland. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 38(2), 193-207.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2024)

Student-Faculty Research Team Selected for CUR Advocacy Program

patenaude — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:20:17 +0000

Student-Faculty Research Team Selected for CUR Advocacy Program patenaude Fri, 10/25/2024 - 09:20

Linguistics

barkan — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:09:51 +0000

Linguistics barkan Thu, 07/25/2024 - 12:09

Program Highlights

Also prepares students for graduate studies in linguistics, applied linguistics, educational linguistics, linguistic anthropology, or sociolinguistics.

Sample Courses

Language and Culture
Linguistic Methods

Linguistics

Why study linguistics at Geneseo?

This minor examines the basic concepts and principles in modern linguistic theory, methods of linguistic analysis, and applications of linguistics to other areas of study. Students gain a solid background for work in any field that requires in-depth understanding about linguistic processes, including language teaching, speech-language pathology and audiology, publishing, translation, interpretation, language policy and planning, language documentation and revitalization, and computer sciences.