Carolyn Sargent
Carolyn Sargent is a medical anthropologist. She focuses on gender studies and health issues, with interests in reproductive health, managing the health of women in low-income families, and decision making in the medical field. She has done fieldwork in West Africa, Benin, Jamaica and France where she worked on reproductive health, midwifery, prenatal care and migrant fertility patterns. She is professor of sociocultural anthropology and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Sargent was the director of women's studies at Southern Methodist University for an extended period. Sargent served as president  of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Sargent is a fan of the French medical insurance system. She has called upon anthropologists to learn about and become involved with national health care issues. In an issue of the "Medical Anthropology Quarterly", Sargent asked that anthropologists help to, "shape public discourses and policy in ways we have rarely done before." She served as a community representative to two hospital ethics committees while she lived in Dallas, Texas. Education. In 1968, Sargent graduated from Michigan State University with High Honors and a Bachelor of Arts. She majored in Japanese, French and international studies  and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. However, in her senior year of college took anthropology classes, and a professor suggested that she earn a graduate degree in anthropology. Sargent received a Marshall Scholarship, which finances up to forty young Americans annually to study at the University of Manchester. In 1970, she received her M.A. for social anthropology. As she was finishing at Manchester, she decided to visit her boyfriend in the Peace Corps in West Africa. She found that they were looking for a researcher and joined the project. She was part of an animal traction project that  was training draft animals. Ten males worked on training oxen, while she worked on researching what kind of people invested in the oxen, what types of supplies they required and how much it would cost. In her free time, she went to a local maternity clinic, which fed her interest in maternal and child health. After three years in the Peace Corps, she returned to the U.S to work on her PhD Her experiences with the maternity clinics in the Peace Corps inspired her dissertation and she returned to West Africa to work on it. In 1979, she received her  PhD in anthropology at Michigan State University. Career. From 1980 to 1985 Sargent was an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU). She became an associate professor in 1985 and in 1990 became a representative for the Texas Committee on Health Objectives for the 90's sponsored by the Department of Public Health. She became a full professor at SMU in 1992 and director of the Women's Studies Program at SMU in 1994. In 2008 she became a professor at Washington University (St. Louis) in the department of anthropology's Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program. She was the president  of the Society of Medical Anthropology (SMA) until December 2009. Working with the SMA Task Force, she and other anthropologists look at what anthropologists can do to participate in policy creation. Sargent created the Task Force because she felt that medical anthropologists could give good information and perspective in regard to the national health care debate, seeing that almost all of them had done research of some sort on the subject. They were looking at how infrastructure could help their research become available to policy makers. Most information is available in the form of (unread) articles and books. Sargent had  the idea that the Medical Anthropology Student Association and Medical Anthropology Graduate Association could compile annotated digests and shorter versions of articles and books for policy-makers. She is developing the concept of "research on demand." This would involve offering anthropologist research efforts to legislators who were planning on making a policy change. Research. During her time in the Peace Corps, Sargent worked in a maternity clinic that primarily catered to elite women. Sargent began collecting data on baby weights despite disapproval from the midwives working in the clinic. Along with observations compiled over her three-year service this became  the focus of her graduate research on reproductive health. Over the years, Sargent's interests expanded to include medical ethics, immigrant health and the controversial debate regarding the healthcare system in the US For ten years, she conducted extensive research in France. Many of her observations stem from her experiences as a patient. Consequently, she supports a "single-payer" healthcare system for the United States. Sargent conducted contrasting research in Dallas, where she sat on two hospital ethics committees for over a decade and was involved in research projects spanning from community to clinical settings. Personal life. She is a  mother of two daughters.