Sam Beck

Facilitating the initiation of the physician’s professional identity: Cornell’s urban semester program

Calling for major reform in medical education, the Carnegie Institute report ‘Educating Physicians’ espoused the importance of assisting student trainees in forming their professional identities. Here, we consider the question: At what educational stage should future physicians begin this process? The literature suggests that the process begins when students matriculate in medical school; we posit, however, that premedical students can begin their proto-professional development as college undergraduates. We describe here the pedagogy of Cornell University’s urban semester program (USP), which enables college students to participate in shadowing experiences as part of an integrated structured study programme. USP students report improved communicative competency, changes in their perceptions and attitudes toward medical practice, and powerful influences on their personal and professional development upon completion of the programme. We suggest the solution to the question of ‘When and under what conditions should shadowing take place?’ is to utilize a structure that combines the exposure of college students to the professional environment with a didactic and self-reflective curriculum, thereby supporting students in their early professional development. We conclude that educational efforts aimed at developing professional identity and behaviour can begin before students enter medical school.

What Brought Romanians to Revolt

The development of internationalized standards of behavior, what Marcus and Fischer noted as ’the &dquo;shrinkage&dquo; of the world into an increasingly interdependent world system’ (1986: 39) is an area of anthropology meriting further study precisely because we have entered a period of history in which international and global concerns beyond those of maintaining state security are being addressed by more and more people.2 2

Public Anthropology as Public Pedagogy: An Autobiographical Account

This autobiographical account provides a historical map of landmarks in the authors personal and professional life that led him to his present understanding of public anthropology as public pedagogy and vice versa. He indicates that his experiences led him to study sociocultural anthropology to investigate learning from experience, a foundational method in anthropology that this discipline describes as participant observation. While not completely rejecting participant observation, he asserts that objective and value-free anthropology is not viable, and hence an activist approach may not only support research agendas but also support the needs of the people and communities under study. He explains some of the issues that are related to making this approach work and the ethical elements involved in an approach that is mutually advantageous. As an anthropologist, he became more involved in the political engagement of the people who were the subjects of his investigation. His position is that at this time in human history anthropology must become more activist, given that the vulnerable of the world are subjected to conditions that are increasingly more exploitative and oppressive. Public pedagogy developed out of his research experiences, and as his activist orientation grew, he found that his anthropological engagement was also an in-context and in-process pedagogy. Not only was he teaching, but he was also learning dialogically, as Paulo Freire might do.

Ethnic identity as contested terrain

As Stanley Diamond has written on a number of occasions, cultural forms and meanings are battlegrounds in the formation of states, whose logic is ethnocidal and therefore destructive of genuine culture1. State ideology has served to accompany political and economic domination, penetrating social formations unevenly. This uneven dimension does not only concern a specific territory or a people of particular territories, but also a condition of a cultural group not necessarily settled in the same region. Hence, those who control hegemonic and dominating devices are able to determine the nature of resistance by defining the nature of class stratification and social control as it appears on the landscape, not only locally and regionally but extra-regionally. In this manner, actually-lived culture is distorted and, at times, even destroyed. The articles included here demonstrate the conflict-ridden arena of culture in state-based societies, those of East Central Europe. Culture in this sense is focused on a relationship that is not created on the basis of consensus. Rather, culture here is understood from the point of view of domination and hegemony, not resistance, and thus the contributions made by authors is in providing increasing clarity to the nature of subordination in a part of the world where structures of domination and subordination have been assumed, rather than needing explanation. Such an understanding is necessary in that new contexts and conditions have been created that problematize the nature of the political and economic regimes that are required to make socialism a viable alternative to the ossified