Alexandra Ciocanel

The University of Manchester · Department of Social Anthropology

In twentieth-century Romania, professional social work faced a tortuous development trajectory following the collapse of the communist regime. Such discontinuity, nevertheless, positively influenced specialized education. Trends included government-mandated (Labor Law) continuing professional development (CPD) in 2003, the formation of the National...

In Romania, as elsewhere, there is persistent controversy surrounding home-opathy wherein various parties try to draw the boundaries of legitimate medical practice. The literature on complementary and alternative medicine features little discussion on the temporal dimensions of controversies surrounding these therapies, focusing mainly on the tempo...

With a history of almost 90 years, professional social work in Romania once flourished up until World War II. The Communist Party disbanded the profession in 1968 and it was reinstated after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Within the context of the socio-economic transition from a centralised to a free-market economy, Romanian social policy a...

Health social work is a field with challenges, opportunities, and ways of professing social work that may vary between different national contexts. In this article, we look at how Romanian health social workers construct their professional identity through their everyday identity work. Drawing on a qualitative study based on interviews with 21 heal...

Background: We discuss homeopathy's placebo effect as the result of a distributed therapeutic agency involving humans, objects, and texts. Homeopathy has been involved in controversies for centuries, and the dispute whether it is therapy or quackery is as lively as ever. Still, homeopathy has retained significant popularity and acceptance within t...

In this paper we examine the evolving roles of digital technology in shaping the professional identity and therapeutic encounters of homeopathic practitioners. Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine that relies almost exclusively in making a diagnostic on patients' verbal description of their symptoms. In contrast to the biomedical diagnosis,...

This article examines how patients who undergo biomedical and homeopathic forms of therapy value medical care and treatment. Based on an analysis of semi-structured interviews, four registers of valuing through which respondents talk about good or bad medical care and treatment are identified, constructing an analytical framework useful in describi...

This article examines some of the main changes in food practices from the first half of 1990s shaped by the new political and economic environment. Based mainly on an analysis of press articles from this period, three main themes are identified in the discussion of alimentation: “hunger”, queues, and new configurations of commerce. This article sug...