Urban Brain Lab

Dominique P. Béhague is a social anthropologist trained at Bryn Mawr College in the US (1991 — BA, 1992 — MA) and McGill University in Canada (2004 – PhD). Specializing in the ethnography of Brazil and the anthropology of health and biomedicine, Dominique has developed specific interests in psychiatry, reproductive health and the politics of global health research. In 2009 she completed an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in an effort to support her long-standing engagement with interdisciplinary research and to complement her growing interest in the anthropology of statistical and “qualitative” forms of reasoning in global health.

Dominique’s main area of research is a direct outgrowth of her long-term research experience in Southern Brazil and is a collaborative project with theDepartment of Social Medicine at the Federal University of Pelotas and theLSHTM. Using long-term ethnographic methods and anthropologically-informed epidemiological surveys, the most recent phase of this project explores how the medicalization of “adolescence” has been shaped by health care reform, the governance of health and economic inequities, and the psychiatric de-institutionalization movement. The study has followed the lives of a core group of young people, participants of the ongoing 1982 Pelotas birth cohort study, from the time these youth were 15 years of age up until their 25th birthday (1997-2007). Dominique is completing a manuscript based on this material entitled Troubled teens: psychiatry and the shaping of adolescence in the wake of Brazil’s new democracy.

Dominique is also engaged in a second area of research, funded by ERSC and conducted as part of the joint University College London and LSHTM DFID-funded 4+5 Research Consortium, uses the maternal health subfield as a case-study to investigate how experts produce and use diverse forms of evidence as a tool in key global and global-national socio-political negotiations. Building from this work, Dominique is developing a proposal to conduct a historical ethnography of the emerging global mental health movement.
Dominique’s research has been supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation, the World Health Organization, PanAmerica Health Organization, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the UK-Department for International Development, and The Wellcome Trust. Her publications in a wide-range of journals — including Social Science & Medicine,Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, The British Medical Journal, and The American Journal of Public Health – have engaged key debates in anthropology, epidemiology, global health, and health policy.

She joins King’s College London on a fractional appointment as a Senior Lecturer in Global Mental Health (in residence during the Summer term from May-July). She will be working mainly on global mental health, both in Brazil and in an international context, consolidating links with the Institute of Psychiatry, the LSHTM and with the newly expanded Centre for Medicine, Health and Society, headed by Professor Jonathan Metzl at Vanderbilt University, where she is currently Associate Professor. Prior to coming to King’s, Dominique was Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Brunel University and Lecturer at the LSHTM, where she is currently holds an Honorary Lecturership.

Projects & Grants:
Mental Health, Migration and the Megacity, £650,000 approx. ESRC Newton Fund

Publications:
Storeng, K.T. & Behague, D.P. (2016) ‘”Lives in the balance”: The politics of integration in the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health’, Health Policy and Planning.

Béhague, D.P. (2016) ‘Psychiatry, bioepistemes and the making of adolescence in Southern Brazil: Psiquiatria, bioepistemes e a formação da adolescência no sul do Brasil’, História, Ciencias, Saúde. Manguinhos, 23, 1, p.131-153

Béhague, D.P. & Lézé, S. (2015) ‘Shaping the modern child: Genealogies and ethnographies of developmental science’, Social Science & Medicine, 143, p.249-254

Béhague, D.P. (2015) ‘Taking pills for developmental ails in Southern Brazil: the biologization of adolescence?’, Social Science & Medicine, 143, October, p.320-328

Storeng, K.T. & Béhague, D.P. (2014) ‘”Playing the Numbers Game”: Evidence-based Advocacy and the Technocratic Narrowing of the Safe Motherhood Initiative’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 28, 2, p.260-279

Links: PURE

Address:
Global Health & Social Medicine
King’s Building
The Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Email: dominique.behague@kcl.ac.uk

Telephone: +44(0)2078480000