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

博士论文研究：慢性正常：生物医学知识如何应用于日常生活这个项目调查了人们如何因患有2型糖尿病而创造新的健康知识和身份认同。这种疾病通常归因于社会、环境、生物和政治原因的组合，这些原因往往与个人和群体身份的概念深度交织在一起。了解人们如何正常治疗2型糖尿病等疾病非常重要，因为在世界范围内，癌症、心脏病、肥胖症、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正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，没有考虑到慢性病患者对这些疾病的意义，也没有考虑到个人和更大范围的因果关系。通过研究日常环境，如在支持小组和免费健康筛查，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联系在一起。在这些社会互动中，慢性病患者产生了新的知识--关于他们的疾病和他们的身份--以及发展基于疾病的社会性。在这样做的过程中，他们形成了可以被称为慢性公众的群体。这个项目的理论意义在于，它融合了医学人类学、科学技术研究和文化人类学，分析人们如何理解美国日常生活中关于慢性病的生物医学知识。与关注临床环境中个人决策的紧张时刻以发现人们如何接受疾病身份的疾病和生物医学研究不同，这项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调解和塑造患病者、非患病者和患病前的疾病身份。此外，它还为关于微观和宏观层面的社会过程如何共存并在日常生活中重塑的理论做出了贡献。

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.