Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Medicalization of Race in a Brazilian Social Movement

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Graduate student Anna Pagano, supervised by Dr. James Holston, will undertake research on the social effects of the increasing medicalization of "race" in Brazil. She will investigate the relationships between a new focus on racial health disparities within Brazilian health policy, social movement discourses, and Brazilian perceptions of racial and cultural difference. Her test case will be a large social movement that propagates the government's new stance on race and health within communities across Brazil. She will conduct a comparative ethnographic study of this movement in Sao Luis and in Sao Paulo, two strikingly diverse cities in the Northeast and Southeast of Brazil. The researcher will employ a variety of ethnographic data collection methodologies, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, surveying, focused group interviews, and textual analysis. These data will be used to test four major hypotheses concerning the movement's uses of race and religion to construct a collective health-related identity, the movement's linkage of race to health outcomes, the movement's reception by local communities, and the impact of regional demographic variations on community reception. There exists an extensive social science literature on emic understandings of race in Brazil, frequently described as a racial democracy because it rejects a bipolar black and white view of race. However, little is known about how these understandings may be altered through recent exposure to race-medicalizing discourses. By investigating how a social movement links race to health outcomes, this research will advance social science theory concerning the relation between collective identities and contemporary practices of genomics and re-biologized theories of race. The research will improve understanding of how race-medicalizing discourses take shape through policy initiatives, processes of social mobilization, and resulting transformations in citizens' attitudes concerning race and health. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.