Rosemarie Santora Lamm, Ph.D., ARNP, Licensed Mental Health Counselor
SFAA-CONAA member since 1992
As a young professional nurse, I was imbued with the observations that patients brought their life experiences to our healing centers. This observation was validated when I found cultural concepts in anthropology! When introduced to the concepts of culture inextricably embedded in the health of individuals was when I discovered the Council on Nursing and Anthropology (CONAA). I conceptually integrated basic theories of culture with experiential nursing experiences. The challenges ahead were many and varied including establishing research that integrated qualitative and quantitative methods. As a member of CONAA, I was able to integrate the specialization of Geriatric Nursing with research. When doing so, I created a platform which allowed experiential learning with a mixed method of research and measurement.
Florida Southern College began a nursing program during the period of time when nursing was moving from diploma and associate degree education toward the Baccalaureate degree in Nursing. We developed a curriculum which allowed registered nurses (RNs) to return to college and complete a BSN in an evening degree completion program. When developing the curriculum, I integrated culturally relevant topics to courses in leadership, health assessment, geriatric nursing, public health and senior capstone seminars. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was influencing public health and aspects of lifeways were integrated into assessments. As research established the disparity in health status as a result of poverty, I integrated research from CONAA colleagues. This research was also being studied in allied disciplines affecting populations as risk Colleagues in CONAA were integrating this into their research projects, publications and presentations.
While teaching in a baccalaureate nursing program, my interest in applied research became apparent. I entered the applied anthropology Ph.D. program at The University of South Florida. Dr. Alvin Wolfe introduced me to Dr. Nancy Anderson, who was then the President of CONAA. She led me into the world of teachers, practitioners and researchers who perceived ideas and concepts which affirmed the integration of social and cultural variables through research. When developing my research I was challenged with how to measure the qualitative variables while integrating the findings with quantitative measurements. The applied researchers in CONAA provided pathways for integrating these variables. We were regularly hearing the words “applied” and “mixed methods” at meetings.
Armed with confidence from colleagues in CONAA, I moved forward with the research project An Association between Depression, Chronic Illness and Health Culture among the Elderly in Three Ethnically Distinct Communities. The integration of The Geriatric Depression Rating Scale with lifeways in the communities of Lincolnshire, England, San Ildefonso, New Mexico, and Polk County, Florida became challenging. The research methods provided a path to success in the completion of the Ph.D. The experience of living in the communities of varied cultures studied provided insight into their lifeways and an emic view of health behaviors. The academic experience is easily described while life changing moments defy the written word!
As a teacher and mentor I was searching for ways to provide a teaching method for students to comprehend the integration of applied anthropology with nursing. Theories are found in the writings of nursing educators from the archives of SFAA and CONAA. Leininger, Brink, Anderson, and Breda became beacons for nurse anthropologists for decades.
While teaching at the University of South Florida I was able to integrate applied anthropology with gerontology. I designed a research study that provided services to the elder community including health information, senior education, seminars and support groups. Students and faculty were providers of services and an integral part of data collection. Participatory Action Research provided the model to develop The Rath Senior ConNEXTions Center at The University of South Florida. Students were taught research in applied anthropology which resulted in the development of a viable program.
As a nurse anthropologist I was able to further develop this center into a private non-profit corporation in the community. The Rath Senior ConNEXTions Center was established with nurses and volunteers connecting seniors to valuable resources for services. As a member of CONAA I have presented the research findings and colleagues have inquired in order to further their nursing and anthropology goals. The valuable research outcomes have provided the framework to continue offering programs for seniors at The Rath Senior ConNEXTions Center and in the community.
While Treasurer of CONAA for three terms, I was able to work with our president Dr. Karen Breda to ensure the ongoing success of nursing in The Society for Applied Anthropology. As an Emeritus member, I continue to support the endeavors of CONAA and their leadership for nursing and anthropology.
Lorna Kendrick, CONAA Member, April 2019
Growing up, I had two role models: my Mom, Evelyn, who was an innovative and original thinker (and very gifted in her ability to understand others) and Nobel laureate Marie Curie who used innovation and originality to change how we understand modern science. I always knew I wanted to be either a research scientist or a foreign diplomat. This ongoing fascination with both the richness of human experience and the disciplined rigor of scientific research was responsible for many of the choices I have made in my professional career.
I chose a career in nursing instead of medicine for two reasons: first, because I realized at an early age that nursing combines both the scientific rigor and the human connection I envisioned as essential for a satisfying career; and second because I loved the time my parents invested in me and I wanted to have the time to do the same for my children. I have not regretted this decision. I have enjoyed a broad range of experiences and opportunities as a nurse. I must admit there have been many times I just didn’t feel connected to other nurses. However, that all ended when I was introduced to the Council on Nursing and Anthropology (CONAA).
When I decided it was time to pursue my doctoral degree, I did my homework. I was seriously considering another California school until I began to learn about the work Dr. Nancy Anderson was doing at UCLA. Nancy was a pioneer through her use of qualitative methods in her nursing research at a time when the accepted standard for tenured professors at UCLA (and most universities across the country) were quantitative approaches. Soon after I was accepted to UCLA’s doctoral program and assigned to Nancy as my advisor I learned that she not only actively engaged as a traditional adviser but defined for me what it means to be a mentor. While guiding her advisees through their doctoral journeys she provided support to us as we undertook a transformational experience.
During graduate school, I took a brief detour when an opportunity arose to pursue quantitative research in Immunology. My focus was on the confluence of immune system responses to emotions (e.g. depression) and the search for correlations between negative changes in the Immune System and, for example illnesses such as hypertension. I began working under a hood with a cell-line but also maintained my interest in human behaviors. This detour ended after a year when my dissertation chair recommended that I consider taking several classes in the School of Medicine to continue the research. Instead, I opted to return to Nancy for advice; she walked me through ways I would be able to complete my dissertation and ultimately combine these two interests in my post-doctoral work.
My research focus became African American men and depression. As an African American woman, with two sons (and a daughter), I was concerned by what I considered the misrepresentation of African American men where the foci of both mainstream media and the academic gaze was on conduct disorders, violence, the disproportionate frequency of incarceration and higher doses of psychotropic medications rather than recognizing the behaviors as a possible manifestation of depression that correlated to societal inequities experienced by these men. I was also concerned these men were at greater risk for worsening health outcomes due to these inequities and maltreatment African American men experience in the United States.
As I began to finalize my study, Nancy suggested I submit an abstract to CONAA for the 2003 Society for Applied Anthropology Meeting in Portland, Oregon. The meeting was inspiring and a wonderful beginning to my launch as a new PhD. What has touched my heart to this day is, Nancy Anderson my mentor and friend, paid for my membership for the first two-years I was a member of CONAA. As such, when I invite a student to attend CONAA I also, as modeled for me by Nancy, pay for the student’s membership.
I am currently CONAA’s archival secretary. Through my membership in CONAA I have been motivated and encouraged to continue to follow in the footsteps of Nancy Anderson, my mom, and Madame Curie as a proud and passionate scientist focused on understanding and improving the lives of those experiencing stressors. CONAA has allowed me to be true to the person I am. I have been able to focus on qualitative research, travel the world, and share with a group of colleagues who think in a similar way. I feel fortunate to have colleagues and mentors who, like me, embrace the uniqueness of our nursing and anthropology journey.
Heidi Bludau, CONAA Member, September 2018
Although I never set out to study the profession of nursing or professional identity, that has been my focus since 2006. As an eager freshman in 1991, I entered college wanting to be an Egyptologist. However, after a summer volunteering at the National Museum of Natural History, I realized that archaeology and I are not a good fit. However, I did like the museum work and changed my career goals to that direction. I graduated with my BA from Texas A&M in December 1995 and, with the goal of becoming a museum educator, stayed to do a Master of Education. By the time I had completed that degree, though, I learned that I was not as interested in this career as I had thought and was working as an academic advisor and program coordinator at TAMU’s Office of Honors Programs and Academic Scholarships. I stayed there until 2002 when I moved to the University of Maryland-College Park to take on the position of Assistant Director of Beyond the Classroom Living-Learning Community. After eight years of helping students pursue their own dreams, though, I knew it was time for me to pursue mine – a PhD in anthropology.
I entered Indiana University’s doctoral program in 2004 with the desire to study how globalization affected national identity in a post-socialist country. I selected the Czech Republic as my field site due to my Czech heritage. I had originally planned to use food as my lens into this topic but the serendipity of anthropological fieldwork struck and I found nurses. Through a personal contact, I met a group of people who were starting a consulting firm that evolved into a healthcare recruitment firm focusing on sending Czech nurses and other healthcare workers to the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia. I spent my year in the field embedded in the company, setting up events, preparing materials and organizing instructors for various pre-migration training sessions. Through this work, I not only had access to a pool of potential research participants, but I was able to conduct participant observation of the recruitment process. I discovered the ways that nurses had to transform themselves into someone who would be a viable candidate for work in a global market, who I call “global nurses.” I also saw women who were seeking respect in their professional, and consequently, personal lives. I specifically focused on how women professionals from the Czech Republic use migration activities to find belonging, and therefore, self-worth and respect, in different spheres of their lives. Sensing a frustration with the lack of professionalism in the Czech healthcare system, as well as the general status of nurses in the national discourse, I claimed that nurses seek migration opportunties as a way to promote personal and professional respect. I completed my dissertation, titled “Searching for Respect: Czech nurses in the global economy,” in 2012.
Since then, I have been able to return to the Czech Republic to close the project with interviews with return migrants. To date, I am reanalyzing my data using a framework of the role of care in the nursing profession. How nurses define, perform, navigate and negotiate professional identity has been at the center of this project. I plan to examine professional identity using various models or theories of care in nursing to re-examine the phenomena at the center of my dissertation, using Czech nurses as a case study. In the future, I hope to return to my theory of global nurses.
Since 2012, I have been a lecturer of Applied Anthropology at Monmouth University in New Jersey. I have three courses in medical anthropology through which I cycle each spring, in addition to teaching introductory and methods courses. I have also expanded my work on professional identity. Along with colleagues in our School of Nursing and Health Studies, I completed a pilot project on how student nurses develop professional identity. We used the three concepts of socialization, Emotional Intelligence, and Power as defined by Elizabeth Barrett.
I have only recently joined CONAA and have been warmly welcomed. I very quickly connected with the organization and have been serving on a subcommittee concerning our social media efforts. Although I’ve been working with nurses for over a decade, I believe that being active in CONAA will enrich my understanding of how nurses understand the work they do. I also hope that I can bring a unique perspective to CONAA. As many of the members in CONAA are nurses who use anthropology to better understand and practice in different healthcare settings, I use the anthropological lens to better understand the practice and profession of nursing. I look forward to engaging more with the organization in the future through presenting on CONAA panels and continuing my service within the organization.
Jennifer Foster, CONAA Member, July 2018
The Council on Nursing and Anthropology (CONAA) is a beloved organization to me. CONAA has helped me to feel my professional path was coherent. I first attended CONAA meetings sporadically in the early 2000s, during my anthropology doctoral program, and I became an at large member of the CONAA board in 2011. It is a supportive organization for scholars of nursing and anthropology.
I got my BSN at the University of Rochester in 1976 and after one year of hospital practice, I served as the primary care nurse in a health post from 1977 to 1980 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural indigenous village in Guatemala. Experiences with birthing women and their families motivated me to pursue graduate training upon my return to the US in public health and midwifery, at Johns Hopkins and the University of Mississippi, respectively. Then I worked as a certified nurse-midwife from 1982-2002, on the eastern shore of Maryland, on Moloka’i Hawaii, in the western Mass area (in a mostly Puerto Rican community, Holyoke, MA). I became interested in Anthropology by means of doing a literature review for a chapter about HIV in pregnancy. What was compelling to me about the HIV epidemic had much more to do with analyses of power than the biomedical response to HIV. Anthropologists, not the medical professionals, spent time discussing these power relationships.
About the time I finished my PhD in anthropology at UMass Amherst, I turned 50 years old. I had been well schooled in critical social theory, but I wanted to work with other nurses and midwives around the world in a way that was informed by the best of anthropology, while not losing my nursing and midwifery practice. In 2003, I joined the Faculty at the School of Nursing at UMass Amherst, but in 2007, I was recruited to Emory University to join a team of nurse-midwife anthropologists interested in global maternal newborn health and health services. I had a nascent project with nurses and community health workers in the Dominican Republic which continues to this day. My focus was on the Hispanophone Americas; in 2015 I received a Fulbright Scholar Award to spend 5 months in Chile with the WHO/PAHO Collaborating Center for Midwifery in the Americas. I retired from Emory at the end of May in 2018. Midwifery and global health continue to be my professional anchors.
From June 2018 to June 2020, I will be living with my husband in Honolulu, Hawaii, as the Resident Couple for the Honolulu Friends Meeting (Quakers). Although I will be too far away to come to CONAA meetings, I hope to remain involved in some way. I am grateful for all the professional support and personal friendship CONAA has provided me.
Greg Konzelman, CONAA Member, 2018
As a new CONAA member, I was asked to sketch a short autobiography. I recently stumbled upon the CONAA website by pure happenstance and emailed Dr. Karen Breda to inquire about the organization. She emailed me back almost immediately, describing the organization and informing me about, at the time, the upcoming SFAA meetings in my hometown of Philadelphia. I had the pleasure of meeting her and some of the other members. I have since joined the organization and excited about being a new member.
I started my journey in anthropology and archaeology a number of years ago at Temple University. I had the opportunity to study under many magnificent professors there, some of whom I remain in contact with 25 or so years later. After graduating I worked doing archaeology in the cultural resource world (contract archaeology) for a number of states’ Department of Transportations and the National Park Service. A year or so later I applied to some graduate schools and finally decided upon Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, New Mexico. After completing my master’s thesis on site formation processes of a Paleoindian site on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, I moved back east and worked again in the cultural resource world, ultimately working for the US Forest at the Allegheny National Forest. At that time, I decided to switch careers for a myriad of reasons. I thought about a number of possible career choices. One of the main factors in deciding my new career path was time. I looked at careers where training could be attained in a relatively short amount of time. I had a few relatives and friends who were nurses with whom I discussed my plans. After these discussions and further contemplation, I applied and was accepted into Thomas Jefferson University’s ASN program. Two years later I graduated and took an ER position at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia where I had been employed as a nurse extern while in school. I remained there for 6 years, completing my BSN on-line at Ohio University. Soon after completing my BSN, I applied at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.
Working with veterans and their families is and continues to be quite a special and honorable experience and allows me to serve those who have served our country. I have a number of roles as an RN here at the VA. My main assignment is in Primary Care. I am the facility’s back-up Traveling Veteran Coordinator whereby helping to facilitate care for traveling veterans within the VA system. Recently, I have become the coordinator for an educational lectureship series on triage assessment skills. I also am an employee volunteer for DEMPS (Disaster Emergency Management Personnel System).
Again, I am very excited about being a new CONAA member. With an anthropological background I continually strive to be a better, well-rounded nurse. Anthropology provides a prism through which the world can be seen. In my case, I can ultimately provide better care for my patients and their families.
