 So hello, everyone. It's lovely to be with you today and to talk to you about anthropology in general, but also what anthropology means now in the post pandemic world. I saw that in the Q&A there was one question. The last question was about possible questions that social anthropologists could examine about the post pandemic world. I hope the next few minutes will give you an answer. And the other questions, there are no more questions. Okay, so I hope everyone is well, wherever you are, I hope you're healthy and good health and keen to learn about anthropology. Before we get started, can I have a show of hands with the raise hand function? Unfortunately, I can't see anyone. And I would have loved to interact with you, but the setting doesn't allow me to do that. But can I have a show of hands in the raise hand function from anyone who doesn't know what anthropology is? Do we have anyone in the audience who would want to know first what anthropology is? Or do you come here with some knowledge of what anthropology is? So most of you do have some idea about what anthropology does, and I hope that in the next half an hour or hour, however long we are together, you leave this virtual room with some better idea of what anthropology is and what it can become now in the context of the pandemic. Before we get started, I might have to say a little bit about myself. My name is Orkide Beruzan. I'm the convener of the Medical Anthropology Pathway at the Anthropology Department at SOAS. I'm a physician, a former scientist and an anthropologist of medicine and science and technology. I studied in universities of Tehran, Oxford, and I obtained my doctorate degree from MIT in the program that I just mentioned, History and Anthropology of Science and Technology. So that's the background that kind of informs what I'm going to tell you. And I've been teaching medical anthropology and STS science and technology studies for over 10 years now in the United States and also here in the UK. And for those of you who are applying to social anthropology or other MA programs that we offer or medical anthropology, I will be the person who deals with the Medical Anthropology Pathway. So in order to talk about anthropology and the pandemic, I want to start with saying a little bit about what we think of the pandemic, how we've experienced this past year. The reason why I was so keen on interacting with you on the screen was that I wanted to ask you about this past year, the immense transformative experience that this year has been for everyone, regardless of how they've been affected by the pandemic, whether medically or socially or through your families, your loved ones, or even the neighborhood around you or the cities you've been in or the movements that you've been deprived of. But think about those experiences and think about the pandemic, not just as a medical problem or a public health problem because it is not just a public health problem. It is also a political problem. It is also a social problem. It is also a historical entity. It is also an economic problem, as we all know about the impact of the pandemic on the economy. So as anthropologists, with medical anthropology, medical anthropology is the oldest and sort of largest subdiscipline within anthropology. And it was kind of formalized in the 1970s, but people were doing medical anthropology even before that, even before the name of the discipline existed. But in anthropology in general, and specifically medical anthropology, we study a number of things. We study matters of health, matters pertaining to health in the context of historical, sociological, and political structures. In other words, we go beyond understanding health only in terms of biology, or in terms of anatomy or physiology or how the body works or genetics or virology. We look at health in a broader sense, in the sense of what it is, what does it mean to live a good life, what does it mean to live a life with integrity, with wholeness, within a particular or specific social, historical, political setting where we are located. That's a really lovely cute cat. We also study epidemics, pandemics in the context of global health. And, you know, there are a lot of anthropological studies on HIV AIDS, on cholera, on, you know, historical and anthropological studies of epidemics and pandemics are actually what have enabled us this past year to to sort of have the tools to think about and to approach this pandemic. So whatever we've been discussing and engaging with this past year rests upon a very long history and a very sizable body of scholarship within anthropology on in general public health issues but also specifically epidemics and pandemics. We also study mental health, which I since the day that the coronavirus pandemic hits. I've been very concerned with the parallel pandemic that is emerging with it and that was that has been the mental health issues that it has caused and that's something that I specifically personally work on. We also study health systems. We study the NHS, we study the health, health care system in different countries, how they work, how they, I'm distracted by the chat. We study health structures. So a lot of what we will be talking about will hopefully make you think about your own experiences if you're in the UK to think differently about what the NHS means, what its history can teach us. What happens to the NHS and it has been happening to the NHS tells us about what kind of society we're becoming and so on and so forth. We study how governments and organizations intersect with our experience of health. So if I have an illness from the medical anthropological perspective, the illness is not just the private matter. The illness puts me in a very intimate relationship with politics, with governments, with the state and with economic structures that shape my experience of that particular illness. All of you have already heard a lot about how different groups of people have been impacted by the pandemic in different ways. And the fact that, you know, pandemics are not very democratic. They don't hit the poor and the rich the same way. They don't hit minorities the same way as they hit other populations, etc. So the premise here is that any health related entity, including illnesses, including epidemics, including pandemics, is not just a biological entity. In order to understand the pandemic, and this is why anthropology is extremely important in our approach to the world, the post-2020 world, we will need anthropological understandings of these notions. Because the premise is that these experiences and these issues are not just biological issues. We cannot tackle the coronavirus pandemic only by understanding the virus and the vaccine and, you know, biology. We will have to understand the historical context that brought us here. We will have to understand the economic context that shaped our ability to deal with the pandemic in different ways in different countries. We will have to understand the political context that shaped the belief systems that led to decisions in different governments and by different governments and also the perception and reception of those policies in populations among lay people. We will have to understand the cultural elements, the cultural context of what it means to experience a health issue that is sort of putting us all in the same boat. We're all in it together. What does that do to neoliberalism? What does that do to capitalism? So there is a whole range of issues we need to understand in order to tackle the pandemic. And that's what health is really. So this is why, you know, when I was thinking about, you know, for a taster section on anthropology, I don't want this to be about medical anthropology. I'm using health. I mean, I want to, I wanted to be about medical anthropology to some degree, but I'm using health as an example of how we approach notions and concepts in anthropology. You can replace health here with climate change. You can replace it with food. You can replace it with migration. So all of these topics in anthropology, we approach them from these different angles and we try to understand what they are in a sort of a holistic way. And we also want to emphasize here that health in general and again the pandemic in this particular instance are issues that are also shaped by other structures. Not just politics and history and economy, but also the experience of the pandemic, the social life of the pandemic has to make us think about notions such as gender, such as race, such as social inequality, such as austerity, democracy, globalization, and technology, and freedom. So the way the past year has changed all of our lives. I mean, never did I even dream of being in a taster session looking at myself and Anna, sorry, and Laura, you know, this is a new experience. What has technology done to us and where is technology in the shaping of this pandemic? So we need to understand the world in terms of technological advancements, in terms of how AI is shaping the future, how machine learning is shaping the future. What are the ethical stakes of all of these changes? What are the key bioethical and ethical questions of the next 10 years? So by the time you graduate and you move into your current or future careers, what are the main questions say in 2030? Are we going to think about health or illness or technology the same way that we think now? I hope not. And I think one of the things that the pandemic has done is that in a way it's been giving the public a crash course in anthropology, because without calling it anthropology, people have become more aware of these sociopolitical and historical and cultural aspects of health because of the pandemic. Now, I'm going to introduce you to a concept that we use in medical anthropology, and I'm going to use that to talk about COVID in a more specific way. Just to get a sense of whether I'm speaking to, you know, void or not, can I have a show of hands through the raise hand function? If you think, if you want me to continue talking about COVID and this understanding of the pandemic through anthropology, in order to give you a sense of what anthropology means in the post-pandemic world, just raise your hand, please. In other words, are we good to go in this direction? I'm assuming that we can keep going, Laura. The concept in anthropology is a conceptual framework we use, and it's called medicalization. And what it means, medicalization, what it means is that, and I'm going to use this to give you a sense of how, in anthropology, how we go about doing what I just said we do. We use specific conceptual frameworks, specific theories, and also ethnographic methods for our research. I'd be happy to tell you more about ethnography and what our research method is in the Q&A, if you are interested in that. We also use these theories and conceptual frameworks in order to make sense of events and happenings and social phenomena. In medicalization, what we mean is medicalization is a social process whereby human conditions that are, say, social, political, human conditions come under the purview of medicine. In other words, they become medical. So if I tell you, you know, addiction, drug abuse. You can think about it in terms of the criminal matter. It could be a crime. There are countries where it's a crime to use drugs, and there are also other places where we approach addiction as an illness. When we approach it as an illness, we make it a medical problem. And therefore, what we're saying is that what is needed is a medical solution. So we don't put people in jail, we give them treatments. You see the difference? And so medicalization basically means exactly what the word implies, making something medical, a medical problem, making something a matter of medical understanding. Now, when we do this, we are taking for granted a set of values. So for example, if we treat a drug addict as a patient rather than as a criminal, we are basically using a different moral framework. We are using a more human approach. We are believing in the right of healthcare for everyone. We're believing in certain rights for certain individuals. And so we are implying a different moral framework. Now, with medicalization like everything else, it's a double-edged sword. There are really positive outcomes of medicalization like the one I just mentioned to you. When you make something, you turn something into an illness or into a medical problem, you're acknowledging, you're recognizing suffering, you're providing care, you're desigmatizing it. You know, thinking about the history of HIV AIDS and how for a painfully long time, so much stigma was attached to illness. And so much work had to be done in order to destigmatize it and acknowledge it as a viral condition, as a medical problem. Now, there are also other positive outcomes. When we decide something, we can improve the quality of life of someone. We can also give them a sense of recognition and relief with things like chronic fatigue syndrome. Patients with chronic fatigue syndrome spend years and years getting misdiagnosed and going from this specialist to another specialist. And everyone tells them that it's not in your head and there is no organic cause or organic thing to pinpoint as a diagnosis. And then when they get the diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, it's not good news, but there's a lot of relief in getting a diagnosis. Because you're finally feeling like, okay, now at least I know what it is. Others are acknowledging my suffering and there might be something we can do about it and there will be care involved. So all of these things are positive outcomes of medicalization. But medicalization can also do something rather negative, which is sometimes when we medicalize something, we are basically implying that it's only a medical problem. And we are in a way de-socializing, de-politicizing it. We think about, say, the example of mental health, for example, which is my area. You can locate mental illness and mental health conditions in the individual brain, as Western Biomedicine does. And of course, you can medicate it and you can provide treatment and psychotherapy and medication, etc. But sometimes and often, often actually, mental health problems are embedded in broader socio-political and cultural and economic issues. You can't treat a problem that is, in effect, is caused by social inequality, by poverty, by unemployment, by racism, by traumas that come from the society and from the violence of political structures, for example. So you can't, if when you reduce all of that to an illness, you individualize it, you make it the individual responsibility to deal with it, or seek treatment or whatever, and you kind of wash your hands off, you know, the responsibility of those broader structures. You kind of dismiss the role of politics, the role of economy, the role of social context, and so that's a pretty dangerous thing that medicalization can do. So we have to always be aware of this double-edged effect of medicalization. And why does that matter when we think about this past year, when we think about the world we are entering now in the aftermath of the pandemic? Basically, all of these conversations come down to an ethical question. The ethical question is, what kind of life do people deserve, whose life matters, whose life doesn't matter, whose life is more valuable than other lives? If you look at the experience of the pandemic in different countries, by now we all know how different countries at different points really messed up. Some got it really right, some got it right and then got it wrong, some got it wrong from the beginning. Unfortunately, in the UK, this hasn't been an easy journey because of decisions that were made irresponsibly or late or for reasons other than the right reasons. In some countries like New Zealand, in Taiwan, in South Korea, you see a completely different kind of approach. And if you think about these different decisions that were made in the face of the pandemic, the differences come down to one question. How much we value our citizens' lives? It comes down to the feeling of how much is my life worth and for citizens to feel whether their life was worth the right decision, whether they had a right to get the right information, get the right initiatives and get the right frontline workers to get the right PPE for. So people have felt that their lives are to varying degrees in a way disposable. And that is an ethical question. It's not just a medical question. And this is why the question of medicalization comes in and is important because with the pandemic, in essence, one of the easiest things to do, or especially for justifying wrong policies, is to medicalize something. So, for example, with the pandemic, if you focus only on the virus and if you focus only on the science, which are absolutely necessary, and thankfully now we have the possibility of a vaccine. But a vaccine is not the only thing that can end a pandemic. It never has. We cannot end a pandemic just by vaccines. We also need all of those other structures that should have been there in the first place, the right decisions, decisions based on evidence, decisions based on expertise and knowledge, decisions based on the democratization of information, access to information and transparency, and also cultural changes. We've all become accustomed now to social distancing and wearing a mask and all of these behaviors that will take a while to get rid of, I think, when lockdown ends, our bodies will take a while to adjust again to being close to others. But the danger of medicalization when it comes to issues like a pandemic that are both biomedical and sociopolitical phenomenon is that it reduces everything to biology and therefore absolves governments and health structures from their responsibility. Now, when we medicalize stuff, we also are basically entering, with the pandemic, we're also entering into the realm of public health. So when we study pandemics and when we study the impact of pandemics, whether it's the mental health impact, whether it's the economic impact, whether it's the social impact of the pandemic, we are also creating a conversation with the field of public health, and therefore we are also creating new categories of personhood. We are creating new terms, such as high risk individual, spreaders, with the pandemic, we have spreaders. We have patients, we have cases, we have risk factors. And so this, in ways that we don't consciously and constantly think about, also has an impact on identities, on the way we identify with the world around us. Now, with COVID and with mental health, if you want to talk more specifically about COVID, in medical anthropology, we have a number of approaches, and two of the major approaches that we study with are these two. One is called critical medical anthropology. In critical medical anthropology, we look at the political economy of health. We look at the sociopolitical structures and contexts that shape the social life of an illness. We look at the social construction of illness. So we look at things such as social inequality, we look at things such as policies such as the way that the trajectory of an illness is tightly intertwined with relationships of power, of gender, of race, of class. And so in understanding this political economy, we basically ask how discourses of knowledge and social, shaped the social, are shaped by and shaped the social conditions of the possibility of an illness. So for example, if you think about the pandemic, the response issues that have been talked about in the UK for a very long time now. You have seen in headlines, headlines about how minorities and the ME patients have had a higher mortality rate. You have seen headlines about government response, the forces that clash between politics and science. The SAGE reports, the SAGE group, how science was articulated through politics and vice versa. What are the political agendas behind these decisions? You've also seen a lot of headlines about comparing different countries. How come New Zealand got it right and we didn't? How is it possible for the United States to get it wrong? You've also seen other headlines about secondary, quote unquote, deaths. For example, higher mortality rates with people who have chronic illnesses because their care has been disrupted because of the pandemic. Screening rates for cancer have dropped because the NHS was overloaded. And last but not least, you've heard and seen so much about the NHS. But the critical medical anthropology approach looks at not how the pandemic is causing these issues because it's not. It's in a way unmasking, revealing problems, structural problems that were already there. You're talking about over 10 years of defunding the NHS, the national health system. What does that mean? I mean, that sentence is, we say it just like that. But for over 10 years, we've been reducing the capacities of our healthcare system. Capacities that would be needed to respond to a pandemic. We even actually specifically, both in the UK and the US, reduced pandemic response capacities in a very tragic way. And so this is how the questions of political decisions, the questions of political agendas are not separate from your experience or my experience or our grandparents' experience of COVID. Everything is interconnected. We also asked how these socioeconomic forces shape the experience of COVID. What is the, you know, for the first time people have understood, for the first time in a long time, I mean, people have kind of started to pay attention to the fact that, you know, my body is not an island. We cannot just go and hoard, you know, toilet papers and think we are safe, because no one will be safe unless everyone is safe. Because right now with vaccinations, we will not be safe even if all of the UK gets vaccinated, unless every country gets vaccinated. And so these questions of inequality, these questions of distribution and access to healthcare and rights to access to healthcare become extremely permanent. And in terms of the NHS, for example, in critical medical anthropology, we study how these neoliberal policies have shaped not just the capacities of the NHS, which all of you by now know are under a lot of pressure, but also how it changes the life of a pandemic. In other words, in anthropology, when we say the social life of something, because everything has a social life. So when we say the social life of COVID, what we mean is how COVID is experienced, perceived, interpreted, even treated or cared for in different social contexts, in different political contexts, in different economic contexts. So in a way, that social life is somehow as important as the medical life of COVID. That we need to, the same way that we need to go for the virus, we also need to go for these problems such as racism, social inequality, and wrong policies. We have another approach in medical anthropology called interpretive medical anthropology, where, rather than looking at the political economy of illness and the social construction of illness, we look at the cultural and phenomenological meaning of experience. We look at subjective experiences. We look at how people experience an illness or the aftermath of an illness or recovery from an illness or the risk for an illness. So the focus will become on culture, which is a huge word. We can also discuss what we mean by culture in anthropology, because we usually use culture with an S as in plural. We have cultures. We don't have a single culture. Culture is not a static entity. It's constantly evolving and in the making. So in interpretive medical anthropology, we look at cultural formations that shake the experience of pandemic. We look at pain. We look at, for example, think about the experience of long COVID now, people who've been suffering from symptoms for months now. How cultural understandings and linguistic understandings shape their experience, how experience is articulated. At the same time, how cultural practices evolve through the experience of an illness. Why is it that in some countries we have protests against masks and in some other places we don't? What does that even mean to have a belief system that protests wearing masks? What are the trajectories of that way of thinking? So we focus on symbolics and on semantics and on the symbolic meaning of things. The emphasis is on meaning. What does it mean to go through something? And how do these frameworks really help us in tackling the world that's ahead of us? We're looking at a post-pandemic world where we have huge rates of unemployment, where waves of racism and sexism have been unmasked, unveiled, spoken about, have come to the surface. An awareness of the responsibility of individuals to be involved in politics, to have a voice, the flaws and premises of democracy, of globalization, of equality have all come to the surface. So we can't get through this stage, through this moment in history, with just the vaccine. We have to understand what this experience has brought to the surface and that's where anthropology comes in. In summer I was having an interview and I was basically, this was a debate about what will, I think it was early June, it was like a few months into the pandemic. And the debate will be forget when this ends, because the idea was that this will end soon. And part of my answer was that it's not going to end for a very long time. This is going to stay with us for, I'm sorry, but we will have a very difficult winter ahead of us. And my argument was that the thing that the pandemic has done is that it's medicalized politics. And in a way, it's politicized medicine. It's done something extraordinary, which is, it's brought these political debates into the world, into the world of health, health care and health debates. And it's also medicalized politics because our political philosophies and our political thinking now are are intensely impacted by immunological thinking. And thinking about language, how notions of security and immunity and risk sort of overlap between politics and health. And that's another conversation. So I want you to think about the experience of this past year of yourself and your families, friends, people who have contracted illness, people. Unfortunately, many of us have lost loved ones. The losses, the tragedies and the anxieties. I want you to think about all of that. And then think about it in a broader context of what it means for societies to go through that. What does that do to a society? What's the work ahead? What needs to be done in the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. There is a before and after. I mean, 2020 will always be known as the year that this happened. And how, how does it compare with other historical examples with the experience of, you know, the Spanish flu was, was mentioned a lot earlier in the pandemic, but also World War One, World War Two, 9-11. There are a lot of milestones that you can think about in terms of how they changed epistemologies in a mass scale. So I also want you to leave this room thinking about all the things that in the past we didn't think of as health issues. We usually don't think about gun violence as a health issue. Gun violence in the United States, unfortunately, let's also acknowledge another shooting just today in Atlanta. It's a disaster, it's a tragedy, but it's also a public health issue. It's not separate from questions of health. Racism is a public health issue because racism has a direct effect on how people have experienced COVID because we know that mortality rates and the severity of illness in among minorities and ethnic groups has been, has been different. We also know that the vaccine outtake is different among minorities. So racism cannot be separated from questions of health. Sexism is a public health issue, is a health issue, is interconnected with questions of health, because there is a reason why some diseases have been less researched. Endometriosis has for decades been ignored because women's pain has been ignored as part of their life. It's just, you know, just get on with it. Why is it that we have so much more research on say back pain. And on endometriosis, because back pain impacted the workforce. Historically, it impacted men more. It impacted women too, but they probably didn't weren't hurt. So there is all of these sort of intertwine issues at the intersection of which you, you come up with the experience of you face the questions that are related to health. And so domestic violence, racism, gun violence, sexism, all of these issues I want you to think about them in relation to how they impact health, how they shape our experience and understanding of health, and also how they have shaped our experience of this pandemic. I think, yeah, I think I just end by saying the, the, the, the, just want to emphasize also the importance of policy and how it's not an abstract issue. When we think about health policies, the same way that we think about climate change, or other other stuff. Replace health with other topics, and then you still get the same approach that anthropology offers. The importance of policy, not as an abstract entity outside of the realm of experience, but as something that is part and parcel of the way we experience life and how it's shaped the, the, the, how health then becomes a political matter. And so much of this, unfortunately, is absent from the training of medicine, like when, when you go through medical school, which is something I've done. You don't, you don't really hear much about these things. There are few places and there are opportunities around the world for, for an education that incorporates some of this, but it's not, it's not widespread. And I think that's, that's a shame, the same with engineering, the same with science, the same with all these other professions that can benefit from anthropological understandings of life and society and social phenomena, because then they will become better in their own field of expertise. I'll stop there and I'll open to questions because I think I talked too much. You probably have about five minutes for questions, and perhaps five minutes more, I'll double check if there's another session following on from this one on this particular Zoom webinar, but we have five minutes and there's been quite a lot of questions. You want me to read over the questions then. Yeah, if you want to have a look and then at the moment the students that are joining can't see the questions. So if you want to answer a particular one if you just click answer live, then they'll be able to see the questions that you're responding to. There's a question about you're an offer holder in MA social anthropology, you want to know more about research supervisor system at SELAS. I would appreciate if you specify what you exactly mean like the soup, you know, if you are, you will have a supervisor for your MA dissertation. Sometimes that person is the convener of the MA that you're studying sometimes not most of the time it is, and you will have regular meetings with that supervisor throughout term two and term three and summer, when you're working on your dissertation. I hope I hope that answered your question. I think whale Taha has asked a question that I'm going to that I would the answer that I hope to think it's still early for social anthropologist to examine the post pandemic world issues or phenomena. No, I think it's late post post pandemic. I think this is one of the issues that anthropology and social sciences in general have, because the perception of the outside world is that we have to wait for problems, and then call them to come and study them. Whereas my argument is anthropology should be part of the conversation from day one with immunology with science with genetics with public health. The same way that we go about addressing problems on the spot, because it's not a pandemic and a post pandemic and there's a line between them. How do you define post pandemic and post post pandemic. You can, you know, we are already post pandemic in the sense that the pandemic pandemic has already happened. You can also think about post pandemic, you know, 10 years after the pandemic so I think my short answer is no, it's not too early. And it's also late. In fact, there's a question about the difference between the MA route, the research route and the different pathways offered. Yes, so the website is in the making. Unfortunately, I'm sad to say that the page for medical anthropology actually is not live yet because we've transformed the program a lot quite a lot, but the website hasn't been as fast in catching up. So you in social anthropology, if you choose a program in social anthropology, you can you can choose a pathway in medical anthropology. You also have the option of choosing different MA programs in future global futures and climate change, sustainability, anthropology of food, anthropology of migration and diasporas. So these are different programs. The medical anthropology masters used to be a program, but now it's a pathway within the social anthropology program that's purely administrative. The point is if you want to study on medical anthropology, you choose medical anthropology, you check that box, it's called a pathway rather than a program but that's really irrelevant. And, you know, the and the research route if you if you do an M res and research, that's the route that goes. That's if you want to pursue a PhD. It would be the first year with your master's degree and then three years, it's called three plus one, the three years of the PhD so that depends on whether you want to do a PhD I hope that answered your question. Any of you surveillance, and it's explicit entrenchment due to the pandemic. Very good question this could be, this could be the topic of the whole other session on data, in fact, I was an hour ago I was on clubhouse, and I was part of a debate on AI and on data. And how we are, you know, this question of how we're handing our data to, you know, even right now you and I talking, you know, I'm acutely aware of how my private space is now being surveyed. And this this data will go into crowds, and I will not have any control over it and so all these ethical questions about data and about surveillance are extremely pertinent to the pandemic and it's part of one of the many issues that that that is included when we talk about those pandemic issues that's a very good question.omatic. How does the medical anthropologist approach. The difference between medical anthropology and social anthropology is that medical anthropologists have, you know, have a sharper focus on understanding the medical aspects of things as well. I'm personally also a physician. Most medical anthropologists are not a physician, but one of the things you should do as a medical anthropologist is that you also have to educate yourself about the medical side of things. And that's what good medical anthropology is. So you have to be able to converse in that language. You have to be able to engage with biomedical knowledge forms and biomedical epistemologies. With social anthropology, we do a broader approach. Medical anthropology has a sharper focus on the health issues and its studies topic that are more health related in a way. But health in the broader sense, as I said, you know, racism is a health issue. We're not just talking about illness and disease. What is the difference between medical sociology and medical anthropology? That's a very good question. Is the difference between sociology and anthropology? So sociology and anthropology in a way share a lot of, they have another commonalities. And part of that is because they use the same social theories. They use the same conceptual frameworks. They use the same theoretical approach. The way they differ is in two ways. One is historically, they've had very different trajectories. They've had very different histories throughout the 20th century. And those distinct histories, which we have no time to go into, have kind of shaped different characters for the two disciplines. But the core difference, the core difference is methodology. Anthropologists use ethnography as a research method, among other methods, but ethnography is the key research method in anthropology. With sociology is more about surveys and larger scale studies. Sociology relies more on, and these are generalizations because there are sociologists who are also ethnographers. There's a lot of overlap and risk loss. But sociology historically relied more on quantitative data on surveys, et cetera. And anthropology relied more on ethnography, qualitative research. But right now, honestly, the deadlines are blurred because a lot of medical sociology programs and colleagues do the same things. We collaborate, depends on university, differs from university to university because the historical legacies shape how the programs work differently. What about medical politics, which I see they study at King's College London? I don't know what program you're referring to, I heard. If you want to specify that. So we had a war in Croatia when I was a child and I have experience with it. We have to stabilize the economy in the most possible and you can see the question. I studied Chinese and Chinese are now attached. Can we fight that only by educating from person? I'm not sure what the question is. I agree with everything you're saying. If you'd like to ask a more specific question, please do so. Thank you so much for this. What methods have medical anthropologists used for ethnography during the pandemic and lockdown? This is a very good question. There's been a lot of debates going on. Ethnography has so many different branches and one of those branches is digital ethnography and virtual ethnography. There's a lot of literature on how they differ. And a lot of ethnography is also about participant observation, not just interviews, but also being part of an experience, being not just an observer, but a participant observer, meaning becoming a member of that quote unquote tribe that you're studying. And with the pandemic, there's so many studies going on with, for example, there's a fantastic project at U Penn, it was a Pennsylvania called Pandemic Journaling Project. And basically worldwide, they're collecting people's diaries, they're asking people to write diaries and journal entries and they're analyzing narratives. That's also ethnography. There's a lot of ways in which you can do discourse analysis, you can analyze what's going on in the media, in the news, in art, in literature, in cultural productions. And so people have been doing a lot of that lately. There's a lot of work with photography, with writing, with poetry, and of course with patients. We have master students in our medical and college program who are writing their dissertations on healthcare workers, on frontline workers, on their experience and the mental health impact on them. Some are writing about patients who've had COVID. So there's still a lot you can do. In other words, ethnography is not necessarily about traveling somewhere far away. You can do ethnography at home too. Sorry, we probably just have time for one more question, and then we'll bring the session to close. The answer to this question is yes. Let me choose a question. I don't know which one to choose. Just while you're choosing a question, that'll give you a little chance to read them. Just for anyone who has on the call and who has any questions just about the application process or admission or how that works, please feel free to email. I'll put my email in the chat. And if you have a question relating to the session, you can also email me and I'll forward your email on and make sure that it gets to the right person. Am I still taking one question or not? Yeah. There is a good question here from Elena. What are the usual career paths after an main anthropology? Options are unlimited. Anthropologists either end up in academia. You can become an academic like us. You can become a practitioner in whatever field that you're interested in and apply your anthropological knowledge there. You can be an engineer and apply your anthropological knowledge there. There is a field called applied anthropology. So there's a whole applied range of professions where you can be a practitioner with an anthropological approach. There is also a lot of consultancy work, advisory work, people going to policy, many people going to NGOs, organizations, and some people start up their own business. You can, and there are different fields in anthropology. There is business anthropology. There's corporate anthropology. There's medical anthropology. So it's really a wide range of career options that you can, if you write to us, we can discuss this in more detail. Perfect. I think we will unfortunately have to draw the session to a close, which we've got so many good questions still in the chat. But thank you so much to everybody for joining us. I've popped my email in the chat. Do feel free to get in touch and we can make sure that they get to the department, to the relevant person and that we can get all of the answers that you need. So yes, feel free to follow up. You'll be able to watch the recording back and hopefully about a week's time alongside all of the other taster sessions that have been running in this week. But thank you very much for joining us and we hope to see some of you at SWAT soon. Thank you so much. Thank you and good luck with your applications for those of you who are applying. Thank you.