About Us

Anthropological Responses to Health Emergencies (ARHE) is a Special Interest Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology. The purpose of the group is to network among members to be able to rapidly respond to developing public health issues and emergencies. The overall mission of ARHE is to engage and collaborate with colleagues working in the field of public health and infectious disease in emergency and humanitarian contexts.  A key goal of the SIG is to provide an effective communication platform for colleagues to generate discussion, raise awareness, quickly deliver preliminary findings from the field and disseminate relevant information.

Current ARHE Co-Chairs

Kristin Hedges (hedgeskr@gvsu.edu)

As an applied medical anthropologist, my primary research interests focus on using community-based research approaches to understand local cultural construction of health, illness, and risk. I am drawn to questions of structural vulnerability and how local contexts impact health and healing.

Lauren Carruth (lcarruth@american.edu)

My research focuses on five themes: (1) labor and inequity within the humanitarian industry, (2) irregular labor migrations between Ethiopia and Gulf States, (3) the relationship between food insecurity, medical insecurity, and diabetes, (4) nutritional wasting in emergencies and the development of therapeutic foods, and (5) emerging zoonotic diseases in the Horn of Africa.