Michele Rivkin-Fish

Associate Professor
Sociocultural Anthropologist, Medical Anthropologist

mrfish@unc.edu
919-962-1243
Alumni Building 305A
CV

Research Interests

Medical anthropology, moral economies of medicine and health, gender and health, reproductive politics, Soviet Russia & post-Soviet Russia

Specializations

Medical Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography

Research Background

Since 1993, I have undertaken ethnographic and text-based research on health and gender in Russia to understand the broader social and political changes in that country since the end of state socialism. My work has examined Russia’s health care reforms, debates and policies on reproduction and demography, sex education, and the daily struggles of women and men to secure well-being among privatization and nationalism. My first book, Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Indiana UP 2005) made two overarching arguments. First, by showing how Western observers and Russian professionals both highlighted the importance of individuals’ moral change, rather than policies ensuring collective well-being, the book critiqued assumptions that the end of state socialism ushered in a collectively empowering democratization. Second, it detailed how the institutional contexts of Soviet health care and state policy – and ongoing changes occurring to them-- affected the micro-negotiations of biomedical power between doctors and women patients. Processes of medicalization, I contend, are shaped by political-economic conditions and specific health care systems; critiques of medicalization are not universal but arise in response to such local conditions.
My second book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (forthcoming, June 2024, Vanderbilt University Press) traces the work of health professionals, writers, and activists who drove a revolution in Russian reproductive practices by enabling the routine use of abortion to be replaced with contraceptive habits. The book spans six-and-a-half decades of Soviet and post-Soviet history, beginning from the re-legalization of abortion in 1955 and extending through the second decade of the 21st century. Detailing the rise of family planning institutions for both clinical and educational goals, the book reveals how Russian contraceptive advocates built a culturally-salient form of liberalism by emphasizing that contraceptive habits would strengthen families and increase fertility. Still, opponents of family planning succeeded in discrediting and defunding these new institutions on the basis of claims that they would reduce fertility and thereby pose a threat to Russia’s national security. The book reveals Russian nationalists’ overriding focus on reproductive and demographic sovereignty at the expense of science and women’s health.
I am currently working on a study of the work of the Russian demographer, Anatoly Vishnevsky, for insights into the ways liberal critiques developed during the late Soviet and post-Soviet era in the public outreach of Russian social sciences.

Education

PhD, Princeton University, 1997; AB, Vassar College, 1990