Dominique Pareja Béhague BA MA PhD

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Background

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 public health policy-making, and psychiatry and mental health.

Teaching

Dominique teaches on Principals of Social Research, Medical Anthropology, International Mental Health, Social Epidemiology, Foundations in Reproductive Health, and Topics in Maternal and Neonatal health. She supervises postgraduate students who come to the LSHTM from all areas, but particularly from anthropology.

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.

Selected publications

• Behague, D.P.; Kanhonou, L.G.; Filippi, V.; Lègonou, S.; Ronsmans, C.; Pierre Bourdieu and transformative agency: a study of how patients in Benin negotiate blame and accountability in the context of severe obstetric events. Sociol Health Illn, 2008;
• Behague, D.; Tawiah, C.; Rosato, M.; Some, T.; Morrison, J. Evidence-based policy-making: The implications of globally-applicable research for context-specific problem-solving in developing countries Social Science and Medicine, 2009;
• Behague, D.P.; Psychiatry and politics in Pelotas, Brazil: the equivocal quality of conduct disorder and related diagnoses. Med Anthropol Q, 2009; 23(4):455-82
• Behague, D.P.; Victora, C.G.; Barros, F.C.; Consumer demand for cesarean section deliveries in Brazil: informed decision-making, patient choice or social inequality? British Medical Journal, 2002; 324(7343):942-5
• Behague, D. P. Beyond the simple economics of cesarean section birthing: women's resistance to social inequality Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2002; 26(4):473-507
• Behague, D.P.; The Domains of Psychiatric Practice: From Centre to Periphery. Cult Med Psychiatry, 2008;
• Behague, D.P.; Psychiatry and Military Conscription in Brazil: The Search for Opportunity and Institutionalized Therapy. Cult Med Psychiatry, 2008;
• Béhague, D.P.; Storeng, K.T.; Collapsing the Vertical-Horizontal Divide: An Ethnographic Study of Evidence-Based Policymaking in Maternal Health. Am J Public Health, 2008; 98(4):644-9

Full publications listing (since 2001)