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

研究生安娜帕加诺，由詹姆斯霍尔斯顿博士监督，将进行研究的社会影响，越来越多的医疗“种族”在巴西。 她将调查巴西卫生政策，社会运动话语和巴西的种族和文化差异的看法种族健康差距的新重点之间的关系。 她的测试案例将是一场大型社会运动，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。 她将在圣刘易斯和圣保罗，这两个在巴西东北部和东南部的城市惊人的不同的运动进行比较民族志研究。研究人员将采用各种人种学数据收集方法，包括参与者观察，半结构化访谈，调查，重点小组访谈和文本分析。 这些数据将被用来测试四个主要的假设，关于运动的使用种族和宗教，以构建一个集体的健康相关的身份，运动的种族与健康结果的联系，运动的接收当地社区，以及区域人口变化对社区接收的影响。 有大量的社会科学文献对巴西的种族进行了主位理解，巴西经常被描述为一个种族民主国家，因为它拒绝接受两极化的黑人和白色种族观。然而，很少有人知道这些理解可能会改变通过最近接触到种族医疗话语。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种族重新生物化理论之间关系的社会科学理论。这项研究将提高对种族医疗化话语如何通过政策举措、社会动员过程以及由此产生的公民对种族和健康态度的转变而形成的理解。这项研究也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.