Building a ‘Culture of Health’: Medical Anthropologists Reflect on an Emerging Idiom of Social Justice Mobilization.

WILLEN, Sarah (UConn) and WALSH, Colleen (Cleveland State U) Building a ‘Culture of Health’: Medical Anthropologists Reflect on an Emerging Idiom of Social Justice Mobilization. Three key factors – the United States’ vast and deepening inequalities in income, wealth, and health; its failures to implement a coherent health reform strategy; and health researchers’ growing understanding of how structural and social determinants influence health – have prompted U.S. health philanthropies to explore bold new strategies for improving Americans’ health. In this roundtable, we reflect on the most ambitious and influential of these models – the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s movement to build a “Culture of Health” – through a medical anthropological lens. Participants include medical anthropologists involved with RWJF as postdoctoral trainees, consulting colleagues, funded researchers, and/or constructive critics.