Heather Young Leslie

Medical and Feminist Anthropology

Areas of Interest:

Medicine, Modernity & Medical Globalization
Ecography
Ethnographic Ethics & Practice Anthropology
Health Disparities & Emergent Issues
Pacific Textiles & Women's Work
Tonga, Oceania, Canada

Interests:

My current research focusses on indigenous Pacific islanders who study Western medicine. At present, my project is focussed on Tongans from the 19th to 21st centuries. The research is ethnographic but includes archival research in Aotearoa New Zealand, Fiji and the United Kingdom. Of particular interest are records pertaining to the Suva Medical School and the Central Medical School, the institutions which evolved into the Fiji School of Medicine, where many Tongans received medical training.

In 2005, I was honored to be a Visiting Research Scholar at the MacMillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury. This time was devoted towards research on historical figures in Tongan medicine, and developing this material for my manuscript (working title "A Polynesian Biomedicine"). Following that, in the spring of 2006, I visited the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, N.Y., in order to double-check dates and persons involved in the early years of Tongans' medical training. This project has received support from SSHRC, Wenner-Gren, and the Rockefeller Archive Centre.

I was recently invited by the Hawai`i Council for the Humanities to participate in a Literature and Medicine Workshop at Bowdoin College, Maine. HCH has elected to initiate a Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® program here. Literature & Medicine is a national award-winning, hospital-based and scholar-led humanities reading and discussion program for health care professionals. It has been found to benefit both care professionals and their patients. Craig Howes, director of the Center for Biographic Research, and I will be facilitators for this exciting new initiative for Hawai`i nei, starting in 2007.

Previous research in the Kingdom of Tonga examined the intersections of women's work, international health promotion agendas, cultural constructions of health and mothers' child care practices. This is documented in my dissertation, which is available from ProQuest . Surprisingly, a key aspect in the everyday construction of health is the production and gifting of women's 'cloth' wealth, a subject I explore in a special issue of the journal of the Pacific Arts Association.

I have conducted applied anthropological research on perceptions of risk among sport fishers and urban poor fishing in polluted watersheds for Health Canada, and a community-based craft revitalization project with Métis women, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. I have also been an active proponent in the emergence of the newest (yet oldest) primary health care profession, midwifery.

Long-term committment to the ethnography of Tonga, in particular the community of Ha`ano in Ha`apai, has given me respect for two adjunct areas of interest: the ethics of ethnographic practice and the traditional importance of local narratives of emplacement. I explore the former in an Ethnographic Fieldschool conducted in Ha`ano, in which the villagers are also Instructors and Evaluators of the students. With respect to the latter, in conjunction with Jamon Halvaksz, I have begun to develop a theory of 'ecography' which recognizes how local ecologies, local histories, and local personalities are mutually inscribed through the skills of local masters of ecological narrative, people who we refer to as 'ecographers'.

Graduate Supervision: I am a member of the Graduate teaching faculty, and hold affiliate positions in the Women's Studies program, the Centre for Pacific Islands Studies, The East-West Center's International Cultural Studies certificate program, and am an adjunct at the University of Alberta. I advise graduate students here in Hawai'i, but also in Alberta and Minnesota. (See some of the students I advise, below)

In my graduate supervision, I am most interested in students working on issues of modernity in biomedical practice and epistemology; studies of science and medicine; medical technology transfer; globalization of health rhetoric and standards; indigeneity and decolonization; gender, ethnicity and power, especially in health-care settings; place and ecography; and ethnographic and empowerment issues as identified by, and of relevance to, indigenous people of the Pacific.

Summary: I have come to the University of Hawai'i from the University of Alberta in Canada, where I was an Assistant Professor and Associate Director for Health Research at the Canadian Circumpolar Institute. I am a classic ethnographer and I believe strongly in the value of long-term, intimate and critically reflexive fieldwork, the responsibility of academics to the communities in which we conduct research. I have published on issues of gender and development, decolonized methods, medical ethnography, health promotion, subjective well-being, women's textile work, globalization and modernity, fishing, and chiefly power. Professional experience includes coordinating the research contract program of the Northern Secretariat of the B.C. Centre of Excellence for Women's Health, and contracts for Health Canada, the Government of Tonga, the Nechako-Fraser Junction Metis, and the State of Hawai`i. My teaching philosophy embraces the diversity of the various cultural and learning styles I have experienced growing up in multi-cultural Ontario, living here in Hawai`i, and while teaching anthropology and women's studies at the University of Northern B.C., at the Wilp Wilxo'oskwhl Nisga'a /Nisga'a House of Learning [Nisga`a are a First Nation of Canada] and at the Ontario Midwifery Education Programme. My volunteer work with the Midwifery Task Force in both Ontario and B.C., and my teaching experience in the Ontario Midwifery Education Programme led to a Ministerial appointment in 1997 to the Executive Board of the College of Midwives of B.C., which started registering midwives in 1998. Since moving to Hawai`i I have worked to establish the Faculty Housing Tenants Association, and provided expertise to the South Seas Women's Development Group, the Green Party of Hawai`i and the Tupou Tertiary Institute.

Heather E. Young Leslie and Ping-Ann Addo
n.d.     Pacific Textiles, Pacific Cultures: Hybridity and Pragmatic Creativity. : Pacific Arts Forthcoming, vol 27-28. Due Fall/Winter 2006

n.d.        ....Like a Mat Being Woven. Pacific Arts Forthcoming, Vol 28. Due 2006

Addo, Ping-Ann, Heather Young Leslie and Phyllis Herda, eds
n.d.    Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovations in Pacific Cloth. Forthcoming as: Pacific Arts vol 27-28. Special Issue in Honor of Jehanne Teilhet-Fisk. Due Fall/Winter 2006

2005    Bons Baisers De Samoa: Les Bonites De Hina et Le Tu'iha'angana De Tonga. Bulletin De La Société Des Études Océaniennes vol 304. Traduit par Sylvie Maurer et Serge Dunis.

2005 Tongan Doctors and Critical Medical Ethnography. Anthropological Forum 15(3):277-286 Special Issue: Critical Ethnography, edited by Laurence Carucci and Michèle Dominy.

Sean E. Moore, Heather E. Young Leslie and Carrie A Lavis.
2005 Subjective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction in the Kingdom of Tonga. Social Indicators Research 70(3);287-311.

2004   Pushing Children Up: Maternal Obligation, Modernity and Medicine in the Tongan Ethnoscape. In Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands edited by Victoria Lockwood, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall Publishers.

2002    Producing What in the Transition? Health Messaging and Cultural Constructions of Health in Tonga. Pacific Health Dialog 9(2):296-302.

2002    Women of the New Millennium: Tongan Women Determine their Development Direction ("silent", posthumous co-authorship with Clare Bleakely). The Contemporary Pacific 14(1):134-147.

Young Leslie, Heather E. and Mike Evans
2001    Understanding Differences and Similarities. In Ethnographic Essays in Cultural Anthropology; A Problem Based Approach. Morrison, R. Bruce and C. Roderick Wilson (eds). Itasca, F.E. Peacock Publishers. [Now available from Wadsworth Press, CA]

2000    Fosterage in Oceania. Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women's Studies. Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, Eds. New York N.Y. Routledge.

1999    Considering the Impact of Gender in Tongan Whaling: A Framework for Evaluation and Suggestions for Maximizing Benefits to Women. Issues in Indigenous Whaling: Tonga, World Council of Whalers. M. Freeman, Editor.

1999     Inventing Health: Tradition, Textiles and Maternal Obligation in the Kingdom of Tonga. Unpublished dissertation, 407 pages, York University.

1998    The Anthropologist, The Mother And The Cross-Cultured Child: Lessons in The Relativity Of Cultural Relativity. In: Fieldwork and Families: Constructing New Models for Ethnographic Research. Juliana Flinn, Leslie Marshall, and Jocelyn Armstrong Eds., Honolulu, University of Hawai`i Press.

1996    Flexibility and Preparation: Keys to Good Fieldwork. In Instead of Full Stops. Susan Sellers, Ed. London U.K., The Women's Press.

Some of my students, past & present (check the photos for hotlinks)