At Miami University, I teach a range of courses, from foundation level courses in cultural anthropology to upper level courses in medical anthropology and ethnographic methods. In all my courses, I seek to build a community of curiosity with students in which we explore both classic and contemporary anthropological writings and concerns.
In my research, I explore how illness is experienced and coped with at the intersections between culture and biology. I’m interested in the social distribution of medical knowledge in health care, health literacy and disparities, health communication including empathy and decision making in healer-patient interactions, medical pluralism, stress, issues of control, agency and helplessness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the experiences of living with chronic illness -- particularly autoimmune diseases.
I continue to publish data from my dissertation fieldwork on the island of Lombok in the Indonesian archipelago. The ethnography Remembering to Live (2001) explores how Sasak peasants cope with the fragility of their lives in rural Lombok. This research was funded by an NSF dissertation research award, with supplementary funding from the Southeast Asian Council and the Association for Women in Science. My most recent article based on these data is “Anxiety, Remember, and Agency: Biocultural Insights for Understanding Illness,” published in Ethos (2009). This article tacks between the ethnographic data on Sasak healing practices which rely on memorized formulae and the biological data from neuroscience and psychology examining the relevant processes of memory and anxiety, arguing that a biocultural analysis leads to a richer understanding of Sasak healing practice than cultural analysis alone.
In my more recent research projects I have worked on transdisciplinary teams. I am the principle investigator of a study that examines to what extent patient access to medical information -- particularly online information -- shapes patient experience and physician-patient interactions. This research focuses on people with autoimmune disorders (ie. lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, multiple sclerosis) and other chronic diseases. This project was run out of the UCLA Center for Culture and Health with support from an NSF Advance Fellows Award and from a pilot award from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Our findings are beginning to be published in medical journals (Arthritis Care and Research & The Neurologist) as well as anthropological journals (Human Organization & Medical Anthropology).
With a recent award of the Lawren H. Daltroy Fellowship in Patient-Clinician Communication from the American College of Rheumatology Research and Education Foundation, I am reanalyzing our recordings and transcripts of clinical interactions to explore empathy in clinical interactions, which will include measuring how long empathy takes.
I am also a senior investigator on a team research project entitled “The Local Knowledge/Evidence Farming,” funded by the Pfizer Corp. This project examines how physicians use information when making clinical decisions and explores how local knowledge might be made available to practitioners in their clinical practice. Our preliminary findings are published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Experience.
M. Cameron Hay,* Ph.D.
Ph.D.: Emory University 1998
MA: Emory University 1992
BA: Grinnell College, 1988
Subfields:
Medical and Psychological Anthropology
Primary Position:
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Anthropology
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio 45056
Office: 156 Upham Hall
Office phone: 513-529-9242
Secondary Position:
Asst. Research Anthropologist
Center for Culture and Health
Dept. of Psychiatry
Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Email: mchay@ucla.edu
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* Note: Professionally, I am known equally by the last name of Hay and Hay-Rollins. This apparent inconsistency is a result of American bureaucratic structures. All of my publications are under Hay.
Last updated 6/2/09
