Doctoral Dissertation Research: Medi(c)ating Illness: An Ethnographic Exploration of Women's Health Education in the Age of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

这项科学和技术研究论文改进补助金的主要目标是支持实地工作，这些工作将导致对药品营销在妇女保健中的作用进行人种学研究。这个项目将把密集的档案工作和口述历史的收集与流行文化分析和大型药品营销公司的参与者观察结合起来。它将侧重于广告和流行的性别和精神疾病理论如何与医学和科学知识的实验性生产相互作用。论文的主题是，药品营销，特别是品牌的发展，正在积极帮助重新定义女性患病的方式，并正在影响女性如何单独和集体地在医疗系统中定位自己，如何制定战略分享医疗信息和个人经验，以及如何就女性疾病和健康的叙事进行谈判。主要产品将是一篇论文手稿，将有助于理解处方药营销在我们对性别、疾病和医疗系统不断变化的概念中的含义。它的分析将借鉴科学研究、医学文化人类学和文化研究的多学科方法。这项对药品营销的研究将对STS的领域做出实质性的贡献。首先，它将记录大众理解和科学话语交汇处的医学知识生产；其次，它将提供一个跨学科的案例研究，说明在学术和企业医学与患者流动之间不断变化的关系中，医疗对象的性质是如何变化的；第三，它将借鉴人类学的人格类别(自我、正常、理性)，提出人们的身份如何越来越依赖于他们与疾病发展起来的个人关系，这些关系正在随着营销赋予处方药治疗的社会意义而变化。该项目的更广泛影响将包括在代表性不足的患者群体、临床研究人员和药品营销者之间建立新的沟通渠道，特别关注妇女的心理保健，并对妇女保健政策的变化进行新的分析。

The principal objective of this Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant is to support field work that will result in an ethnographic study of the role of pharmaceutical marketing in women's health care. This project will combine intensive archival work and the collection of oral histories with popular culture analysis and participant observation at a large pharmaceutical marketing firm. It will focus on the ways in which advertising and popular theories of gender and mental illness interact with the experimental production of medical and scientific knowledge. The thesis is that pharmaceutical marketing, specifically the development of the brand, is actively helping to redefine the ways in which women can be ill, and is affecting how women individually and collectively situate themselves in medical systems, how they strategize to share medical information and personal experiences, and how they negotiate narratives about female sickness and health. The major product will be a dissertation manuscript that will contribute to understanding the implications of prescription drug marketing in our changing notions of gender, illness and medical systems. Its analysis will draw off the Multidisciplinary methods of science studies, medical and cultural anthropology, and cultural studies. This study of pharmaceutical marketing will contribute substantively to the fields within STS. First, it will document medical knowledge production at the intersection of popular understandings and scientific discourse; second, it will provide an interdisciplinary case study of how the nature of medical objects is changing within shifting relationships between academic and corporate medicine and patient movements; third, it will borrow from anthropological categories of personhood (self, normality, rationality) to propose how people's identities are depending more and more on the personal relationships they develop with their illnesses, which are changing along with the social meanings that marketing attaches to their prescription drug treatments. The broader impacts of this project will include the establishment of new lines of communication between underrepresented patient groups, clinical researchers and pharmaceutical marketers, with a special focus on women's mental health care and new analyses of the changes in women's health care policy.