This evening, Drs. Anne Sadler and Charles Hilton will be discussing their respective work regarding health issues in areas suffering from violent conflict. Both Sadler and Hilton have studied how different measures of health change are affected by conflict within a country or certain demographic. The panel discussion, which is being organized by the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, is meant to increase awareness of the program as a whole.
Dr. Hilton, Anthropology, is a visiting professor at the College whose work mainly focuses on how certain biomedical markers, such as Body Mass Index, vary within regions experiencing conflict.
Dr. Sadler, Psychiatry, is the acting chief for the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the University of Iowa. Her work for the Medical Center has been concerned with a number of research projects that relate to the gynecological health and mental wellbeing of female veterans. She will be presenting on her work that looks at a more medically intensive side of conflict in addition to her experiences working with sexual violence and trauma against females in the military.
This event was largely made possible by the efforts of Lamia Faruk and Patrick Kinley (both ’16), two students interested in the continuing work of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Originally the Iowa Peace Institute, the program was endowed to the College in 1987. They credit the program as being integral in helping them develop this panel from an idea into an actual event.
“Peace and Conflict Studies is a really unique program at Grinnell,” Kinley said.
Faruk and Kinley stated that one of their main motivations has been attracting more science-minded people to the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. The strong social consciousness of Grinnell’s student body is what inspired Faruk and Kinley to give speakers like Sadler and Hilton a platform at Grinnell as an attempt to bring the sciences together with this traditionally social science-minded program.
“Grinnell is a school that so many people are attracted to because of social justice,” Faruk said. “In the end there are so many Grinnellians who would in a heartbeat volunteer for Doctors Without Borders,” Faruk said.
Additionally, Kinley argued that “health may be one of the most useful measures of a conflict,” so the two aforementioned speakers can properly outline the value of medical work and monitoring in the aftermath of conflict.
Both presentations will be followed by a question and answer period, which is when the organizers would like to see attendees’ reactions to the interdisciplinary work.
“We hope to get even more through a participatory question and answer period,” Kinley said.
Through this format, Faruk and Kinley are primarily hoping to increase the recognition of the importance of health for populations in war-torn and conflict-ridden regions.
“It is almost always timely, if war is an increasing pattern in our world then people are always sick, sometimes inequitably,” Kinley said.
Both stated that they hope attendees will be more aware of the work done by those like Sadler and Hilton.
“Health is very vital in terms of conflict,” said Faruk, as this event strives to impart an interdisciplinary understanding of the importance of health.
The event, Health in the Aftermath of Conflict, will take place tonight from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. in JRC 101.
