Janis H. Jenkins

Janis H. Jenkins is a psychological and medical anthropologist.  She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School.  She has taught on the faculty at Harvard University, Case Western Reserve University, and UCSD.  While her primary appointment is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, she holds an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry.  She is also on the Steering Committee of the UCSD Global Health Initiative. 

Dr. Jenkins has been Principal Investigator on a series of NIH-funded grants, and is the recipient of awards from the Society for Psychological Anthropology, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Departments of Mental Health in California and Ohio, and the School for Advanced Research.  She has also served as mentor for a numerous doctoral, post-doctoral, and faculty research and training grants in the social and medical sciences.  Currently, she is preparing an edited volume entitled “Pharmaceutical Selves: Psychopharmacology in a Globalizing World” that is the product of an Advanced Seminar she organized as recipient of an award funded by the School for Advanced Research.

Her principal interests are culture and subjectivity in relation to the self, emotion, gender, adolescence, migration, violence, resilience, mental health, and psychopharmacology.  Her ethnographic research has been with Mexican immigrants, Salvadoran, Vietnamese, and Iraqi Kurdish refugees, Puerto Rican migrants, and other Latino, Euro-American, and Native American populations across North America.  

Published works examine ordinary and extraordinary experiences that define what it means to be human across an array of social and cultural contexts.  In her research, Professor Jenkins has addressed the enduring question of whether the normal and pathological are discontinuous categories or poles on a continuum, favoring an ontological approach that calls into question explicit and implicit categorical distinctions.   Dr. Jenkins has theorized and empirically examined the significant variation in the course and outcome of illness in relation to socio-emotional response of kin, cultural conceptions of illness, and the subjective experience of medicine and healing.  She has carried out ethnographic studies of violence and warfare and explored what she has termed the “political ethos” – defined as culturally organized feeling and sentiment pertaining to social domains of power and interest -- of societies besieged by violence, terror, and torture.  These studies have been aimed at theorizing the nexus among the role of the nation-state in constructing a political ethos, discourses about affect, and cultural phenomenology and the mental health consequences of those who dwell in that ethos.  Dr. Jenkins and her colleagues have identified culturally specific bodily transactions of emotions and embodiment of trauma such as the sensation of intense heat in the body.   Not only are such phenomena central to mind-body problems, they are also of clinical significance insofar as they may be misdiagnosed as, for example, menopause or high blood pressure. 

Current Research:  Southwest Youth Experience of Psychiatric Treatment (SWYEPT)
Dr. Jenkins is currently Co-Principal Investigator (along with Dr. Thomas
Csordas) for an NIH-funded (RO1 MH071781) study entitled “Southwest Youth and the Experience of Psychiatric Treatment” (SWYEPT).  This research is a collaborative effort carried out with an interdisciplinary team.  The study examines psychic distress, cultural meaning/dissonance, and structural violence among adolescents who are placed in residential psychiatric facilities.  Also studied are adolescents who have not been treated for mental illness and who exhibit no signs of significant emotional distress according to research diagnostic criteria.  The study is being conducted among a multiethnic population (Latino, Native American, Euro-American) with a research protocol that is longitudinal and spans a wide geographical area, following participants after hospital discharge into a range of social settings including other psychiatric facilities, kin-based homes, foster care homes, schools, and neighborhoods.  Methods of study combine ethnographic observation and interviews, psychiatric diagnostic interviews, and informal and unstructured procedures over time and across a range of social settings. 

Our goal is to produce anthropological knowledge of broad use to those concerned with culture and social conflict, mental health services, and an informed public policy that affects the lives of youths through institutions of care, containment, or social abandonment.  The study is intended to shed empirical light on the often-neglected sites of poor American communities that are violence-ravaged by gangs and drugs.   A major concern is to identify what strategies youths create to elude such circumstances and under what conditions they succumb to these circumstances.   Institutional and everyday neoliberal discourse on “personal responsibility” is analyzed in a context of choosing short-term psychiatric facilities as preferable to incarceration in prisons/detention centers.  The problem of uncontrollable rage, and what can at times appear as heroic familial struggles to “contain” such powerful affects has also emerged ethnographically as a central problematic for the development of social, moral, and political theorizations of youth culture and life worlds.