Maria Elena Planas

Maria Elena Planas studied Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Lima, Peru), and obtained her MSc in (Medical) Anthropology at the Université de Montréal (Canada) and her MA in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester (England). Since 2006 she is a PhD candidate at the ASSR and at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at Leiden University. She is working on a project entitled Positioning ethnicity/’race’: discrimination, identity and psychological distress in Lima, Peru. Her research discusses the local salience and the psychosocial relevance of ethnicity/’race’ among youngsters and adults in Lima, and narrates how ethnicity/’race’ is (not) instantiated in intersectional subjective positionings, moral predicaments and local material and discursive conditions. She is working in the interface between medical anthropology and epidemiology, and is drawing on work from photography, media studies and visual anthropology to discuss the usefulness of visual methods in her research.

Maria Elena’s main fields of interest in the last years have been health promotion, equity and mental health. Since 2000 Maria Elena is Associate Professor at School of Public Health at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (Peru), and has been coordinator of the Mental Health Research Unit. She has been also a member of the Permanent Advisory Committee of Mental Health at the Peruvian Ministry of Health, and has been involved in various academic and activist organizations that promote equity in (mental) health in Peru.