Doctoral Dissertation Research: Medi(c)ating Illness: An Ethnographic Exploration of Women's Health Education in the Age of Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

这项科学和技术研究论文改进补助金的主要目的是支持实地工作，这些工作将导致对药品营销在妇女保健中的作用进行人种学研究。这个项目将结合大量的档案工作和口述历史的收集，流行文化分析和参与者观察，在一家大型制药营销公司。它将侧重于广告和流行的性别和精神疾病理论与医学和科学知识的实验生产相互作用的方式。本文的论点是，医药营销，特别是品牌的发展，正在积极地帮助重新定义女性患病的方式，并影响女性在医疗系统中的个人和集体定位，她们如何制定分享医疗信息和个人经历的策略，以及她们如何就女性疾病和健康的叙事进行谈判。主要产品将是一篇论文手稿，这将有助于理解处方药营销在我们不断变化的性别、疾病和医疗系统概念中的含义。它的分析将借鉴科学研究、医学和文化人类学以及文化研究的多学科方法。这项药物营销的研究将对STS的领域做出实质性的贡献。首先，它将在大众理解和科学话语的交叉点记录医学知识的生产；其次，它将提供一个跨学科的案例研究，研究医学对象的性质如何在学术和企业医学与患者运动之间不断变化的关系中发生变化；第三，它将借用人类学的人格范畴（自我，正常，理性）来提出人们的身份如何越来越依赖于他们与疾病发展的个人关系，这种关系随着市场营销赋予处方药治疗的社会意义而变化。这个项目的更广泛影响将包括在代表性不足的病人群体、临床研究人员和药品销售人员之间建立新的沟通渠道，特别注重妇女的心理保健，并对妇女保健政策的变化进行新的分析。

The principal objective of this Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant is to support field work that will result in an ethnographic study of the role of pharmaceutical marketing in women's health care. This project will combine intensive archival work and the collection of oral histories with popular culture analysis and participant observation at a large pharmaceutical marketing firm. It will focus on the ways in which advertising and popular theories of gender and mental illness interact with the experimental production of medical and scientific knowledge. The thesis is that pharmaceutical marketing, specifically the development of the brand, is actively helping to redefine the ways in which women can be ill, and is affecting how women individually and collectively situate themselves in medical systems, how they strategize to share medical information and personal experiences, and how they negotiate narratives about female sickness and health. The major product will be a dissertation manuscript that will contribute to understanding the implications of prescription drug marketing in our changing notions of gender, illness and medical systems. Its analysis will draw off the Multidisciplinary methods of science studies, medical and cultural anthropology, and cultural studies. This study of pharmaceutical marketing will contribute substantively to the fields within STS. First, it will document medical knowledge production at the intersection of popular understandings and scientific discourse; second, it will provide an interdisciplinary case study of how the nature of medical objects is changing within shifting relationships between academic and corporate medicine and patient movements; third, it will borrow from anthropological categories of personhood (self, normality, rationality) to propose how people's identities are depending more and more on the personal relationships they develop with their illnesses, which are changing along with the social meanings that marketing attaches to their prescription drug treatments. The broader impacts of this project will include the establishment of new lines of communication between underrepresented patient groups, clinical researchers and pharmaceutical marketers, with a special focus on women's mental health care and new analyses of the changes in women's health care policy.