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

研究生安娜·帕加诺将在詹姆斯·霍尔斯顿博士的指导下，对巴西日益加剧的种族医学化的社会影响进行研究。她将调查巴西卫生政策中对种族健康差距的新关注、社会运动话语和巴西人对种族和文化差异的看法之间的关系。她的测试案例将是一个大型社会运动，在巴西各地的社区内宣传政府在种族和健康问题上的新立场。她将在巴西东北部和东南部的两个截然不同的城市圣路易斯和圣保罗对这场运动进行人种学比较研究。研究人员将采用多种人种学数据收集方法，包括参与者观察、半结构访谈、调查、重点小组访谈和文本分析。这些数据将被用来检验四个主要假设，这些假设涉及该运动使用种族和宗教来构建集体健康相关身份，该运动将种族与健康结果联系起来，该运动被当地社区接受，以及地区人口差异对社区接受的影响。在巴西，存在着大量关于种族理解的社会科学文献。巴西经常被描述为种族民主国家，因为它拒绝两极的黑人和白人的种族观点。然而，关于这些理解如何通过最近接触到的种族医学化话语而改变的，人们知之甚少。通过调查社会运动如何将种族与健康结果联系起来，这项研究将推进关于集体身份与当代基因组学实践和重新生物化的种族理论之间的关系的社会科学理论。这项研究将通过政策倡议、社会动员过程以及由此导致的公民对种族和健康态度的转变，提高对种族医学化话语形成的理解。这项研究还将有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.