Eugene Raikhel
PhD, Princeton University, 2006
I am a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. I am particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. My work follows therapeutic technologies as they move both from "bench to bedside" and from one cultural or institutional setting to another, examining how they intersect with the lives of practitioners and patients.
I am currently completing a manuscript based on my doctoral research, titled Governing Habits: Addiction and the Therapeutic Market in Contemporary Russia. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg among institutions dealing with substance abuse, this book examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and addiction in Russia over the past twenty years. A detailed description of the project is available here.
Two new projects, both based largely in North America, are in an earlier stage of development. The first of these will explore how research in neurobiology is shaping diagnostic and treatment technologies for addiction, with a particular focus on the consequences of these changes for patients. A second project will trace the changing meanings of "environment" and "toxicity" in expert and lay conceptions of mental health and illness. In an initial stage of this project, I am collaborating with colleagues in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University on an ethnographic study to examine how neuroscientists, geneticists and psychiatrists draw upon the latest scientific knowledge to explain suicide, and how family members, in turn, take up these explanations.
From September 2007 to February 2010 I held a postdoctoral fellowship in the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services Research in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University.
I also developed and frequently contribute to Somatosphere, a collaborative academic weblog focused on medical anthropology at its intersections with cultural psychiatry, bioethics and science and technology studies.
Contact Information
Office Hours
Time may vary from week to week. For current office hours and to sign up, please visit: https://wiki.uchicago.edu/display/~eraikhel/Office+hours
Office hours are held in 5736 S. Woodlawn, #203.
Courses
(Syllabi are subject to change)
Culture, mental health and psychiatry
(offered Winter 2013)
Illness and subjectivity
(offered Spring 2013)
Selected publications
Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, eds. Addiction Trajectories. Duke University Press, 2013.
Eugene Raikhel. "Radical reductions: Neurophysiology, politics and personhood in Russian addiction medicine." In Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby eds. Wiley/Blackwell, 2012.
Eugene Raikhel. "Post-Soviet Placebos: Epistemology and Authority in Russian Treatments for Alcoholism." Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry., 34(1): 132-68, 2010.
Eugene Raikhel. "Institutional Encounters: Identification and Anonymity in Russian Addiction Treatment (and Ethnography)." In Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth, John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi eds. University of California Press, 2009.
Laurence J. Kirmayer & Eugene Raikhel. "From Amrita to Substance D: Psychopharmacology, Political Economy, and Technologies of the Self." Transcultural Psychiatry, 46(1): 5-15, 2009.
Amir Raz, Eugene Raikhel and Ran Anbar. "Placebos in Medicine: Knowledge, Beliefs and Patterns of Use." McGill Journal of Medicine, 11(2): 206-211, 2008.
Fellowships and grants
Co-Investigator. "Neurosciences and the Afterlife of Death: Re-imagining Notions of Suicidal Risk." (S. Lloyd, S. Choudhury, F. Jollant, L. Kirmayer, E.Raikhel, G. Turecki). Operating Grant, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, 2013-16.
Co-Investigator. "Improving access to clinical and community resources for multicultural mental health care." (L. Kirmayer, F. Lemire, K. McKenzie, C. McKnight, N. Caidi, A. Cortinois, M. Desmeules, R. Grad, I. Hemlin, A. Jadad, U. Kiziltan, Y. Leanza, G. Mazowita, L. O'Grady, P. Pluye, E. Raikhel, A. Ungureanu). Knowledge to Action grant, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, 2008-10.
Post-doctoral Fellowship, CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services Research, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, 2007-09.
Post-doctoral Fellowship, Harriman Institute for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, Columbia University, 2006-07.
Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, Princeton University, 2004-06.
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 2003-04.
