Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Sociolegal Analysis of the Discourse of Competing Affirmative Rights Claims

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Today, important social and legal decisions are increasingly made based on arguments about rights. Yet as opposing sides of contested social issues both adopt the language of rights to make their claims, how do societies prioritize and respond to competing understandings of who has rights? Government officials, religious institutions, legal systems, and various stakeholders may strongly assert affirmative rights claims that inherently conflict with one another. This creates problems for policymakers who must determine whose rights to protect, and also consider the impact of these decisions on the lives of citizens. The research supported by this award uses intensive ethnographic methods to better understand the social and legal contexts in which multiple perspectives and declarations of rights emerge, and the meaning of these claims for experiences of citizenship. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations invested in discovering more effective methods for communicating science to the public.This research will be conducted by University of California, Irvine, anthropology doctoral candidate Emily Matteson, with guidance from Dr. Angela C. Jenks. The research will take place in Valparaiso and Santiago, Chile, where recent changes in health policy have raised questions about how different kinds of rights are practiced, prioritized, and protected. The researcher will work with stakeholders, NGOs, doctors and public health officials, patients, and policymakers, to examine how these diverse actors make, relate, and enact rights claims in the context of shifting policies. Data will be collected through participant observation, interviews, mapping, and archival research. Findings from this research will produce the rich, multi-perspective data needed by policymakers and social scientists to understand the competing rights-based frameworks that impact both experiences of citizenship and access to healthcare.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.