I’m looking for someone to do some research as part of a project
based in Sydney. The project, ‘Compassion at the Heart of Well-Being:
An Inter-Disciplinary Study of Well-Being in a Healthcare Setting,’ is
based in the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the
Australian Catholic University campus at Strathfield in Sydney, and also
involves staff at the University of Sydney, where I am based, Sydney
Local Health District and Victoria University of Wellington in New
Zealand. It is funded by the John Templeton Foundation.The project is centred around a meditation programme for nurses and
health-care staff in a number of hospitals in the Sydney Local Health
District. The approach is based around a psychology RCT, but is
deliberately pluralistic, with a number of other measures intended to
enrich and supplement the central RCT. Among these is an anthropological
component, which involves both on-ward observation and extended
semi-structured and and unstructured interviews with a sub-group of the
participants. I am in charge of that component and am looking for
someone to do the bulk of the field research (I will also be doing a
limited amount myself).The field research component will probably start in March 2017 and last
till the end of the year. The person involved would need a good
background in medical anthropology and have at least some experience
with field research, preferably in a health care context. We have about
$8000 to $10,000 in funding (the exact amount is still under
negotiation).I expect that many of the people involved will be from non-English
speaking backgrounds, so it would be a plus if the person had relevant
language skills and/or cultural experience, though that isn’t a
requirement.Geoffrey Samuel
Body, Health and Religion Research Group
School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney
International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine
+ info: Geoffrey Samuel – SamuelG@cardiff.ac.uk