Jenna Grant
Background:
I am a doctoral candidate currently writing my dissertation. I recently moved to The Netherlands, and have an affiliation with the Health, Care, and the Body programme of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam.
I study forms of modernity in Cambodia, primarily related to biomedicine - such as imaging technologies, clinical research, medical diplomacy, and bioethics - but also related to film and other visual practices. My masters paper looked at a controversial HIV prevention clinical trial in Cambodia, and my dissertation research, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the University of Iowa, focuses on imaging technologies, particularly ultrasound. My fieldwork was based in Phnom Penh between 2009 and 2011, and moved between diagnostic imaging wards and non-clinical settings, among patients, their families, doctors, nurses, technicians, health administrators, distributors and manufacturers. Archival research in Phnom Penh and France traced the emergence of biomedical technologies in postcolonial medicine. I am also conducting a related project on a biomedical journal, the Annals of the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital, a Cambodian-Soviet collaboration published between 1961 and 1971.
I am working on a film about healing and possession in a Cham village in Cambodia. My film Sakamapeap [Activity] (2005), an experimental collaborative project with four of my neighbors in Sereysophon, concerns the performance of everyday activities. Sakamapeap was discussed in Kathryn Ramey’s chapter on experimental film and visual anthropology in Made to be seen: Perspectives on the history of visual anthropology, Banks and Ruby, eds. (Chicago, 2011).
Publications
2012 (forthcoming) ‘The ethics bureaucrat’ in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity. Joshua Barker, Erik Harms, and Johan Lindquist, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
2011 Review of Cambodians and Their Doctors: A Medical Anthropology of Colonial and Post-Colonial Cambodia. Pacific Affairs.
2007 Untitled. Installation, four channel audio, two channel digital video. University of Iowa.
2005 Sakamapeap [Action] digital video, 27 min. (Winner of 2005 Jean Rouch Award from the Society for Visual Anthropology).
2005 (Analyst and Co-Author with IRARE Team) Drug Use and Sexual HIV Risk Patterns Among Non-Injecting and Injecting Drug Users in Phnom Penh and Poipet, Cambodia. Report Summary. National Authority for Combating Drugs/UNAIDS/UNODC.
2004 Images of Cambodia in a Meskwaki Scene. Installation, five channel digital video/audio. University of Iowa Museum of Natural History.
