Doctoral Disseration Research: Chronically Normal: Reshaping Everyday Life through Type-2 Diabetes

博士论文研究：慢性正常：如何在日常生活中使用生物医学知识这个项目调查人们如何创造新的健康知识和身份作为生活与2型糖尿病的结果。这种疾病通常归因于社会、环境、生物和政治原因的结合，这些原因往往与个人和群体身份的概念深深交织在一起。了解人们如何将2型糖尿病等疾病视为正常的疾病是很重要的，因为在世界范围内，癌症、心脏病、肥胖、抑郁症和哮喘等慢性疾病很普遍。政府间组织以及世界各地的地方和国家公共卫生组织都在争先恐后地遏制这一趋势，但干预措施往往采用个人或社区一级的干预措施，这些干预措施没有考虑到慢性病患者对这些疾病的理解，也没有综合考虑个人和更大规模的因果关系。通过研究日常环境，如互助小组和免费健康检查，或观看公共服务公告，这项研究调查了疾病如何将原本陌生的人们联系在一起。在这些社会互动中，慢性疾病患者产生了关于他们的疾病和他们的身份的新知识，并发展了基于疾病的社会交往。在这样做的过程中，他们形成了所谓的长期公众。该项目的理论意义在于，它将医学人类学、科学技术研究和文化人类学相结合，分析美国人在日常生活中如何理解慢性病的生物医学知识。疾病和生物医学研究侧重于临床环境中个人决策的紧张时刻，以发现人们如何承担疾病身份，与此相反，本研究考察了社会关系、专家和非专家知识以及物质文化如何在病人、非病人和病前病人之间调解和塑造疾病身份。此外，它还有助于研究微观和宏观层面的社会过程如何共存并通过日常生活进行改造的理论。

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Chronically Normal: How Biomedical Knowledge is Used in Everyday LifeThis project investigates how people create new kinds of health knowledges and identities as a result of living with type-2 diabetes. This illness is often attributed to combinations of social, environmental, biological, and political causes that are often deeply intertwined with conceptions of individual and group identity. Understanding how people come to treat illness such as type-2 diabetes as normal is important because worldwide, chronic disease conditions, such as cancer, heart disease, obesity, depression, and asthma are prevalent. Intergovernmental organizations as well as local and national public health organizations across the world are scrambling to stem the tide, yet interventions often draw on either individual or community-level interventions, which do not take into account the meanings that people with chronic illness attribute to these diseases, nor integrate individual and larger-scale attributions of causality. By studying everyday settings, such as at support groups and free health screenings, or watching public service announcements, this research investigates how illness binds people together who would otherwise be strangers. In these social interactions, chronic illness sufferers produce new kinds of knowledge -both about their illnesses and about their identities- as well as develop sociality based around illness. In doing so, they form what can be called a chronic public. The theoretical significance of this project is that it integrates medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and cultural anthropology to analyze how people make sense of biomedical knowledge about chronic illnesses in everyday life in the United States. In contrast to studies of illness and biomedicine that focus on intense moments of individual decision-making in clinic settings to discover how people take on illness identities, this research examines how social ties, expert and non-expert knowledge, and material culture mediate and shape illness identities among the ill, the non- and pre-ill. Moreover, it contributes to theories about how micro- and macro-level social processes coexist and are refashioned through everyday life.