Frances Norwood

Title:: Assistant Research Professor in Anthropology
Office:: No on-campus office
Email:: [email protected]

Areas of Expertise

Long term care and end-of-life health policy; healthy aging, disability; innovative health care solutions; quality improvement; spirituality and health; independent living and aging in place; health care reform and health policy; critical medical anthropology; qualitative and quantitative methodologies; United States and the Netherlands.

Dr. Norwood is a medical anthropologist with interests in disability, end-of-life, euthanasia, aging, long-term care, spirituality and health, and innovations in long-term care and end of life health policy. She was President of the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists in 2015-16.

Current Research

Dr. Norwood regularly works on projects to support innovations in long term care and improvements in end-of-life supports. In 2020, she will be promoting the second edition of her book, The Maintenance of Life (2020) and is starting a novel. For more on her research, visit Dr. Norwood's website.

Dr. Norwood's complete CV

Education

Ph.D. 2005, University of California-San Francisco and Berkeley
M.A. 1994, American University
B.A. 1989, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Publications

Books

2020 Norwood, F. The Maintenance of Life: Preventing Social Death Through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life Care, Lessons from the Netherlands. Second edition. Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology, Carolina Academic Press. Durham, NC. Published in French Mourir un Acte de Vie. Trans. Pierre Viens and Lise Laberge. Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2010. Winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Award.

2009 Norwood, F. The Maintenance of Life: Preventing Social Death Through Euthanasia Talk and End-of-Life Care, Lessons from the Netherlands. Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Published in French as Mourir un acte de vie. Trans. Pierre Viens and Lise Laberge. Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2010. Winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Award.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

Norwood, Frances and Joanne Lynn. 2020. Taking long term care from crisis to thriving in the time of COVID-19. Journal of Aging Studies, 54(September). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2020.100865

Norwood, Frances. 2018. The New Normal: Mediated Death and Assisted Dying in the United States. In A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Antonius C. G. M. Robben, editor. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Norwood, Frances. 2015. End-of-Life Choices in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2^nd Edition. Elsevier Limited. Oxford, UK.

Norwood, Frances. 2013. “A Window into Dutch Life and Death: Euthanasia and End-of-Life in the Public-Private Space of Home,” in Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on the Life Course, edited by Caitrin Lynch and Jason Danely. Berghahn Publishers, NY.

Norwood, Frances, Gerrit Kimsma, and Margaret P. Battin. 2009. “Vulnerability and the ‘slippery slope’ at the end-of-life: A qualitative study of euthanasia, general practice and home death in the Netherlands.” Family Practice 26(6):472-480; doi: 10.1093/fampra/cmp065.

Norwood, Frances. 2007. “Nothing More To Do: Euthanasia, General Practice, and End-of-Life Discourse in the Netherlands.” Medical Anthropology 26(2)139-174.

Norwood, Frances. 2006. “The Ambivalent Chaplain: Negotiating Structural and Ideological Difference on the Margins of Modern-Day Hospital Medicine.” Medical Anthropology 25(1):1-29. Reprinted as April 2006 Article-of-the-Month with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education.

Classes Taught

Anth 3531/6531: Methods in Sociocultural Anthropology

Anth 6391: Topics: Life, Death and Modernity

Last updated September 9, 2020