May 2007: Prazak was awarded a Research Grant from Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Post-PhD to study Kuria Family in the Era of HIV/AIDA. [Read more.]

In January 2007, Prazak was invited to a UN AIDS/CAPRISA Consultation in Durban, South Africa, on Social Science Perspectives on Male Circumcision for HIP Prevention. The purpose of the meeting was to explore cultural, social, and other aspects related to the proposal to scale up the offer of male circumcision services in high HIV prevalence settings; and to develop recommendations for research and action.

In November 2006, Prazak attended the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco where she and Jennifer Coffman (James Madison University) co-organized a panel, Managing Bodies in Today’s Kenya: Subjected and Regulatory Bodies in Politics, Conservation and Health. Prazak also presented a paper, Kuria Girls and the NGOs.

January 2006: The following article appeared in the Daily Bulletin at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada:

A leading scholar on the controversial practice of female circumcision will speak tonight as UW's Public Anthropology Lecture Series continues. Miroslava Prazak, a cultural anthropologist from Bennington College in Vermont, will present a public lecture titled "Making the Cut: A Kenyan Community Confronts the Tradition of Female Circumcision."

The talk starts at 7:00 in Arts Lecture Hall room 113. A reception will follow. It's the first of two public lectures this year sponsored by the anthropology department, under the general title of "Public Anthropology: The Intersection of Health, Culture and Society".

Organizers say that human health is one of the most important public policy issues facing Canadians and is connected to all other human endeavours. The series is supported by Learning Initiative Funds from the office of the associate vice-president (learning resources and innovation).

In her lecture, based on ethnographic fieldwork, Prazak will discuss the controversial and changing practice of female circumcision in Kuria society in Kenya. Female genital surgeries such as those practised by the Kuria are little understood, although often condemned as primitive, unhygienic and dangerous by people in the West. The case that Prazak will examine involves a Catholic missionary priest who supports the surgeries and international NGOs which oppose the surgeries, as well as the Kuria girls upon whom the surgeries are performed and who are caught in the middle of an ideological battle about modernity and social and religious values.

Prazak has conducted fieldwork in Kenya since 1984. She has published on social change, modernization, family life and work, and child mortality.

—Daily Bulletin January, 24, 2006

Bennington magazine, May 2005: Prazak co-chaired a session on the cost of education in Africa at the African Studies Association meetings in New Orleans. Her paper was entitled “The Costs of Free Education in Rural Kenya.” Prazak’s chapter on Kenyan families was included in African Families at the Turn of the 21st Century, a collection edited by Yaw Oheneba-Sakyi and Baffour K. Takyi (Praeger Publishers).

Bennington magazine, November 2004: Prazak gave a presentation at the American Ethnological Society Meeting in Atlanta, GA. Her paper, “Genital Cutting as a Threshold in Identity Formation in Rural Kenya,” was part of a session that she co-organized with Janice Stockard of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.