Doctoral Dissertation Research: Feedback between training and practice in conceptualizations of phenotypic variation among medical trainees

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How humans make sense of the world around them depends on a combination of experience and instruction. Medical education often relies on typologies and thresholds to inform medical practice. What happens when experiences of more graded variation in human phenotypes contradicts typological medical instruction? How do trainees’ experiences in care delivery feedback on instruction centered on typologies? How do emergent technologies shape understandings of phenotypic variation and the effects of such understandings on practice? This project merges theory from medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of education to inform an understanding of how characterization of human variation takes shape in reaction to education and experience. Project findings will be broadly disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences and the project will train a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection, and analysis.This doctoral dissertation project will leverage 15 months of ethnographic research among medical trainees, including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral history interviews, and textual analysis of pedagogical materials, to: 1) capture how trainees are taught to understand human variation, 2) investigate how scientific technologies and instruments reflect and affect understanding of human variation in care delivery, and 3) clarify how personal experience interacting with and providing care for varied subjects feeds back on concepts and typologies of human variation. By paying explicit attention to the dynamics of how concepts of variability are shaped and reshaped in reaction to education, experience, and technology, this project will advance a synthetic understanding of how humans mobilize concepts of variation in everyday practice.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.