Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network (LUMAN)

How do people experience health, illness and wellbeing? How do health interventions travel across the globe? How are health inequalities embodied, created and subverted through institutional structures and public spaces? These are several of the core questions that medical anthropologists work on. Leiden University has medical anthropologists in various faculties and departments. The Leiden University Medical Anthropology Network (LUMAN) brings these anthropologists together with the aim of fostering interfaculty collaborations and creating common ground for working interdisciplinary on health-related themes in Leiden and beyond.

Some of the common themes of our expertise both in the Netherlands and globally are policies and practices of care; politics of health interventions; aging and the life course; health institutions and insurance; and health at the intersections of gender, class, race, ability and religion. In order to understand people’s experiences, perspectives and priorities, and how these relate to health policy and inequality, we use a range of qualitative methods. Next to the classic ethnographic toolkit of participant observation and in-depth interviews, these include narratives, participatory action research, and focus groups, but also creative multimodal methodologies such as drama, video and graphic art, as well as discourse and document analysis and archival research.

More information on the members and activities of the LUMAN network will follow soon. If you have any questions, please contact one of the convenors of this network: Dr. Josien de Klerk, Dr. Nienke Slagboom and Dr. Annemarie Samuels.