Facul-Tea: Michele Rivkin-Fish

In honor of International Women’s Day, grab a cup of tea (or coffee!) and join us for a chat with Dr. Michele Rivkin-Fish, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Learn more about Dr. Rivkin-Fish’s personal experiences in the region and what led her to her current focus on health care in Russia.

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Since 1993, Michele Rivkin-Fish has undertaken ethnographic research on health and gender in Russia as an arena for understanding the broader social and political changes in that country since the end of state socialism. Most specifically, her work has examined Russia’s health care reforms, debates and policies on reproduction and demography, sex education, and the daily struggles of women and men to secure well-being as privatization expands in official and unofficial ways. Her book, Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Indiana UP 2005) contributes to feminist and medical anthropological scholarship linking reproductive politics with transformations of the state and citizenship. Her approach brings into view a range of actors and levels of analysis, from international development consultants to state policy makers, demographic experts, clinic- based professionals, community activists, and laypersons, as well as the interactions between them.

In addition to her work in Russia, she is currently developing new research on the moral economies of medicine and health in the U.S. Her interests focus on the work of American cultural notions of charity, justice, empathy, responsibility, entitlement, and scientific authority in socializing health professional students into the political-economy of the US health care system.