Ekaterina Anderson is a PhD student in the sociocultural track of the Anthropology department. She plans to conduct her research on how Israeli clinicians understand and manage cultural difference in mental health settings. The Ministry of Health directive requiring cultural competence in Israeli medical institutions went into force in February 2013, amidst the ongoing public debate in Israel about the scope and institutionalization of cultural diversity on the political level. Ekaterina will investigate how Israeli clinicians navigate a reality of an increasingly culturally and religiously diverse society that is officially identified as “Jewish and democratic” rather than pluralist or multiculturalist. Her project will combine participant-observation of cultural competence training with an ethnographic study of clinicians as they draw on cultural categories on a daily basis. On a larger scale, the study will shed light on how medical knowledge and clinical practices are produced in heterogeneous societies that do not embrace the liberal discourses of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism. A native of Russia, Ekaterina earned her BA and MA in Middle East Studies at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod. She received postgraduate training in child and adolescent psychology at Rhode Island College in Providence, RI. She has been awarded Boston University’s Dean’s Fellowship in 2012 and Boston University’s Short-term Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship in 2013.