Dominique Behague BA MA PhD (Anthropology) MSc (Epidemiology)

Honorary Lecturer in Social Anthropology

Dominique P. Béhague joined the LSHTM in 2002 as a Lecturer in Social Anthropology. She trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist during both her undergraduate and postgraduate years, receiving a BA and then MA in Social Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia (1991 and 1992), and a PhD from the Departments of Anthropology and of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal (2004). She has, alongside her studies, worked in public health, specialising in the anthropology of health, the politics of research in the population sciences, international evidence-based policy-making, and psychiatry and mental health. In 2009, Dominique completed a MSc in Epidemiology at the LSHTM as part of her broader interest in conducting interdisciplinary research and in understanding the evolution of public health science from an anthropological perspective. In 2010, she became Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Brunel University.

Affiliation

Teaching

Dominique lectures on four modules: Medical Anthropology, International Mental Health, Social Epidemiology, and Foundations in Reproductive Health. She is currently on the doctoral advisory committees of 5 students doing doctorates at the LSHTM on issues relating to mental health, psychiatry and global health politics.

Research

Dominique is currently engaged in two areas of research, both of which relate to the anthropology of biomedical and population sciences, of public health problems, and of global policy-making.

The first area of research, funded by The Wellcome Trust, is a direct outgrowth of her long-term research experience in Brazil. A collaborative project with the Federal University of Pelotas (http://www.epidemio-ufpel.org.br/index.php), this project uses ethnographic and epidemiological approaches to explore the influence that recent social, political and health care changes in Pelotas, Brazil, are having on the life course and health of the young men and women, particularly as it relates to mental health and violence. It aims to explore how innovative medical and public health practices have emerged out of popular grass-roots movements and initiatives geared towards promoting democratic practice. Since the end of the most recent military dictatorship (1964 - 1984), Brazilian scientists, policy-makers, physicians, and psychiatrist have played a crucial role in shaping national public health policy-making and in implementing community-based mental health initiatives as a way of targeting particularly challenging issues such as youth violence and mental morbidity. A significant outcome of these initiatives is that previously marginalised local populations are beginning to engage directly with local political processes in an effort to change economic and health inequities.

Dominique's second area of research, funded by The Economic and Research Council (with K. Storeng http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/ideu/research/ideu_research_detail.php?id=230&mp=1) and the Department for International Development (as part of the 4+5 Research Consortium http://www.towards4and5.org.uk/), investigates how the production of evidence within the main disciplines contributing to public health, namely epidemiology and biostatistics, is being shaped by international institutions and evolving mechanisms of professional accountability. Using the maternal health subfield as a case-study, this research explores how forms of scientific evidence are currently produced and used in public health, with a view to understanding how it is that researchers are being pressured to comply, ever more, with a very specific way of defining evidence-based policy-making.

Research areas

  • Health inequalities
  • Health policy
  • Maternal health
  • Research : policy relationship

Disciplines

  • Anthropology

Disease and Health Conditions

  • Mental health

Other interests

  • Adolescence
  • Anthropology Of Science And Policy
  • MARCH
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