Shan-Estelle Brown

About Shan-Estelle Brown

Shan-Estelle Brown, PhD is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Global Health Program at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Previously, she was Postdoctoral Research Associate in the AIDS Program at Yale School of Medicine. She is a mixed-methods medical anthropologist with training in qualitative research and pedagogy on writing. She is the author of Writing in Anthropology: A Brief Guide (Oxford University Press). Her research interests include conducting community-engaged research, improving patient-centered outcomes with medical technologies, understanding patients’ perceptions of risk and well-being, and identifying structural facilitators and barriers to health care access and retention in care. She has researched these issues for genetic diseases like sickle cell disease and for infectious diseases like HIV.

How can students learn to talk about the relevance of Anthropology?

A frequently-asked question to Anthropology students about their choice of major is “What are you gonna do with that?” Inspired by the 2018 AAA Annual Meeting in San Jose, the Rollins College Anthropology department faculty decided to make some structural changes to infuse professionalism into all parts of our academic programs. Some of these changes included: Swapping the Anthropology theory core course for an ethnographic methods course to provide a skillset that undergraduate students could take with them after graduation to their future careers Including in each course examples of anthropologists and archaeologists at work today Revising the Senior Seminar [...]