Discipline(s):
Psychiatry, Cultural Anthropology, Clinical Medicine

Area(s) of Expertise:
Medical Anthropology, Sociomedical Sciences, Addictions/Substance Abuse, Urban Ethnography, Caribbean and Latin America, Latinos and African Americans, HIV/AIDS, Public Anthropology, Ethnography, Policy

E-Mail:
helena.hansen@nyumc.org

Background:
Helena Hansen earned an MD and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University, during which she completed fieldwork in Havana on Cuban AIDS policy, in urban Connecticut on harm reduction and needle exchange, and in Puerto Rico on faith healing in evangelical Christian addiction ministries founded and run by self-identified ex-addicts. The connecting thread in her work has been a focus on the moral economy of marginalized people, and their strategies for navigating institutions and unequal power relations through different stages of substance use and HIV risk. Her work has been published in both clinical and social science journals ranging from Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and Medical Anthropology, to the Journal of the American Medical Association and the journal Medical Care. After graduate school, she completed a clinical residency in psychiatry at NYU Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital, during which she also undertook a political-economic and ethnographic study of a new biomedical treatment for addiction; opiate maintenance therapy with buprenorphine. In this study she examines the social and political implications of the effort to establish addiction as a biomedical, rather than moral or social condition, as well as the ways that neurochemical treatments may be reinscribing hierarchies of ethnicity and race. As a Robert Wood Johnson fellow, she will further develop these themes, using cultural-historical comparison with methadone maintenance therapy and other harm reduction movements in the U.S.

Journal Articles:
Click here for a list of Helena Hansen's available publications in PubMed.