On September 12, it was announced that Lesley A. Sharp, Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professor of Anthropology, has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Society of Medical Anthropology’s Leah M. Ashe Prize for the Anthropology of Medically–Induced Harm, which recognizes “excellence in explorations of the limits of healing practices.”
She received the award for her article titled “Death and Dying in Carceral America: The Prison Hospice as Inverted Space of Exception,” which was published on January 30, 2022 in the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
Self-nominations were not permitted, and eligible works needed to employ ethnographic methods to explore the limits of health care (broadly defined), the results of which could be immediate or lingering and intrinsic to treatment or the result of error, negligence, intention, or the denial of care.