The Faculty of Science cordially invites you to attend the HeLa Celebration to raise awareness about the HeLa initiative at Carleton and most importantly, Henrietta Lacks’ story. A keynote speech titled Doing Justice: the Study of Life and Practice of Science will delivered by invited speaker Dr. Sahar Sadjadi.

About the Speaker:

Sahar Sadjadi studied medicine at Tehran University, worked as a physician in an emergency room in Kurdistan, Iran and received her PhD in medical anthropology from Columbia University. Prior to joining McGill University, she was faculty at Amherst College. She has held research fellowships at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Paris Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University

Research Interests

Dr. Sadjadi’s research lies at the intersection of anthropology of medicine, gender and sexuality studies and childhood studies. She is interested in the cultural conceptions of the relation between the body and the self that inform medical thought and practice. She conducted a multi-sited ethnography of the clinical practices that have emerged around childhood gender nonconformity in the United States. Sadjadi’s recent work has focused on pediatric endocrine alteration of the processes of growth and puberty. This inquiry revolves around the potentials and limits of biomedicine when implicated in the projects of social justice, and the temporal and affective politics governing medical interventions that seek to enhance the life chances of marginalized children. Her new project is a transnational ethnography of contemporary sexology. Her research has been funded by The Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation and Brocher Foundation.