Global Health Colloquium

Amy Borovoy, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University & Christina A. Roberto, Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania

Amy Borovoy is a cultural anthropologist who studies modern Japanese society and culture. Her work has focused on health care and mental health in the context of Japan’s social democracy, with its emphasis on family and corporate welfare. She has written on the cultural construction of alcoholism and codependency in The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependence, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan (University of California 2005), which explores the problem of male alcoholism and the role of the housewife and domesticity in public life. Borovoy's work on the phenomenon ofhikikomori (young adults who isolate themselves at home) explores resistance to the medicalization of youth issues among psychiatrists, social workers, and teachers. Borovoy has also written "Japan as Mirror: Neoliberalism's Promise and Costs,” in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (Carol J. Greenhouse, editor), “The Rise of Eating Disorders in Japan: Issues of Culture and Limitations of the Model of ‘Westernization’” co-authored with Kathleen Pike, and “Decentering Agency in Feminist Theory” with Kristen Ghodsee. Her current manuscript in progress, Japan in American Social Thought, explores postwar Japan studies as a space in which to imagine alternatives to liberalism and individualism in American anthropology and the social sciences.

Christina A. Roberto, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Roberto is a clinical psychologist and epidemiologist. She is principal investigator of the Psychology of Eating And Consumer Health (PEACH) lab. Her research aims to identify and understand factors that promote unhealthy eating behaviors linked to obesity and eating disorders and design interventions to promote healthy eating. In her work, she draws upon the fields of psychology, marketing, behavioral economics, epidemiology, and public health to answer research questions that can provide policymakers and institutions with science-based guidance.

Lunch will be served beginning at 11:45am

Organized by the Global Health Program.
Co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School's Center for Health & Wellbeing and the Department of Anthropology.