PROGRAM IN GLOBAL HEALTH STUDIES

Geographic Regions: Western Africa (Sierra Leone) and Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia)

Topics of Expertise: Global Mental Health, Trauma, and Humanitarian Psychiatry, Comparative Conflict and Post-Conflict Studies, Postwar Memory Politics, Post-socialism, Public Health and Development in West Africa

Research and Teaching Interests

Global health, critical medical anthropology, development, Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia), West Africa (Sierra Leone), humanitarian psychiatry, post-conflict public health, science and technology studies

Biography

Peter Locke is a cultural and medical anthropologist focused on bringing ethnographic evidence to the comparative study of global health and humanitarian intervention in post-conflict societies. His field research, writing, and teaching all explore the intersection of humanitarian work, reigning modes of evidence production, and local struggles for health and healing in the wake of war. At Northwestern, Professor Locke teaches courses on the social determinants of health, war and humanitarianism, and trauma and mental health. He helped to establish and direct the Global Learning Office’s summer study abroad program, Comparative Public Health: Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been a popular opportunity for global health students since 2016. As a Fulbright Specialist, he taught qualitative and ethnographic research methods to doctoral students at the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Political Sciences in Spring 2022.

Locke’s doctoral research in Bosnia-Herzegovina examined how the urban poor cope with traumatic histories and rebuild their lives in a new post-war state and economy. Working closely with mental health caregivers and their beneficiaries, Dr. Locke charted the impact and sustainability of humanitarian psychiatry and psychosocial support services for war survivors in Sarajevo. Locke’s dissertation (under revision as a book manuscript) aims to illustrate how anthropological evidence can help to ground debates about international humanitarianism and democracy-building, enrich social scientific and clinical approaches to trauma, and imagine alternative approaches to post-war social repair that better incorporate the values, needs, and desires of survivors.

Locke also accompanied small undergraduate teams to pre-Ebola Sierra Leone to conduct ethnographic research on global health and humanitarian projects and encounters. He worked together with students and the leaders, caregivers, and beneficiaries of a small American-funded medical humanitarian organization to address the challenges of healthcare delivery across steep economic, cultural, and political divides.

Prior to joining Northwestern’s faculty, Locke served as a postdoctoral research associate and then as a lecturer for Princeton University’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy.

Global Health Courses Taught

• The Social Determinants of Health
• Introduction to International Public Health
• Qualitative Research Methods in Global Health
• War and Public Health
• Trauma and Its Afterlives
• Mental Health and the Arts

For advising needs/questions, students with last names starting with A-K should direct questions to Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies Dr. Peter Locke and students with last names starting with L-Z should direct questions to Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies Sarah Rodriguez. 

Invited Lectures and Presentations

• “City of Survivors: Trauma and Humanitarian Psychiatry in Postwar Sarajevo.” Invited Lecture, Institute of Ethnography, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia, Dec. 11, 2023. 
• “Practical alternatives for meaningful and ethical research.” Session leader, international workshop on “Unpacking Ethical Dilemmas in Conflict and Disaster Research,” Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal, November 29, 2023. 
• “Anthropology in and of a Changing Global Health.” Roundtable Participant, 122^nd Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 19, 2023.
• “The Trauma Trope.” Panel participant (with Robin Means Coleman, Miriam Petty, and Ana Antic) at the symposium “Media and Mental Health: Exploring Contemporary Representations of Madness, Melancholy, and Trauma in Film and Television.” Northwestern University, May 25, 2023. 
• “The Weight of Survival: Fragments of Care in Sarajevo, 2007-2022.” Paper presented at the conference “In the Frictions: Fragments of Care, Health and Wellbeing in the Balkans,” Zadar, Croatia, April 30, 2023. Organized by the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Zadar, and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade.
• “City of Survivors: Psychological Trauma and Social Services in Postwar Sarajevo.” Montgomery Lecture, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Program, Feinberg School of Medicine, Feb. 17, 2022.

Recent Publications

• Biehl, João, and Peter Locke, eds. 2017. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. Durham: Duke University Press.
• “The effects of Societal Violence in War and Post-War Contexts” (with Hanna Kienzler). 2017. In Orr, David, and Sumeet Jain, eds., Palgrave Handbook of Global Mental Health, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 285-305.
• “Anthropology and Medical Humanitarianism in the Age of Global Health Education.” 2015. In Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, eds., Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 193-208.
• “Anthropology and Medical Humanitarianism in the Age of Global Health Education.” Book chapter, in Sharon Abramowitz and Catherine Panter-Brick, eds., Medical Humanitarianism in States of Emergency, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
• “Appropriating Trauma: Legacies of Humanitarian Psychiatry in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.” 2012. Intergraph: Journal of Dialogic Anthropology 3(2).
• Biehl, J., & Locke, P. (2010). Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming. Current Anthropology, 51(3), 317-351. DOI: 10.1086/6514