This year’s winner for “most excellent blog” was Culture Matters; but even before the award contest we were thinking of ways we could highlight the excellent work being done there – as well as get a piece of the action ourselves. It was with that in mind that we invited Culture Matters blogger and frequent Savage Minds commentator Lisa Wynn to guest blog for us.

For her stint as a guest blogger Lisa suggested doing a series of posts on her new research project, which focuses on reproductive health technologies in Egypt. She also wanted to co-author the posts with her collaborator on this project, Hosam Moustafa. The posts will explore some of the complex methodological issues involved in negotiating research in Egypt, as well as the different technologies, and anecdotes ‘from the field’, etc. Short bios of Lisa and Hosam are below the fold.

Welcome Lisa and Hosam!

Lisa Wynn did her PhD and a postdoc at Princeton and then joined Macquarie University’s anthro department in Sydney last year. She has boring-first-name anxiety so she publishes under L.L. Wynn. Her first book is called “Pyramids and Nightclubs, A Travel-Ethnography of Western and Arab Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and Colonies of Atlantis to Sex Orgies, Rumors about a Marauding Prince, and Blond Belly Dancers.” Despite that start in the anthropology of tourism, her latest research is in medical anthropology, focusing especially on contraceptive technologies in North America and Egypt. In short: from sex orgies to contraception! She blogs on Culture Matters.

Hosam Moustafa is an Egyptian physician from the town of Kafr el-Sheikh who recently graduated from al-Azhar Medical School where he studied under some of the great names in Egyptian medicine. Al-Azhar is a venerable ancient institution of religious learning that branched out into medicine into recent years but still gives its students a solid grounding in Arabic language, rhetoric, and Islamic jurisprudence. He started studying at al-Azhar’s primary school at the age of 5 and by the time he graduated, his cumulative scores made him one of the top ranked students in all Egypt. In 2008, he started working with Lisa on a project investigating local interpretations and representations of reproductive health technologies in Egypt. His real love, however, is surgery: “I love to have my arms covered in blood up to the elbows.”