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

今天，重要的社会和法律决定越来越多地基于关于权利的争论。然而，当有争议的社会问题的对立双方都采用权利的语言来提出自己的主张时，社会如何优先考虑和回应关于谁有权利的相互竞争的理解？政府官员、宗教机构、法律系统和各种利益相关者可能会强烈主张本质上相互冲突的平权主张。这给政策制定者带来了问题，他们必须确定保护谁的权利，并考虑这些决定对公民生活的影响。该奖项支持的研究使用了深入的人种学方法，以更好地理解出现多种观点和权利宣言的社会和法律背景，以及这些权利主张对公民经历的意义。除了为人类学研究生提供经验、科学数据收集和分析方法方面的培训提供资金外，该项目还将通过向致力于发现更有效的向公众传播科学方法的组织广泛传播其研究结果来增强对科学的理解。这项研究将由加州大学欧文分校人类学博士生艾米莉·马特森进行，安吉拉·C·詹克斯博士将提供指导。这项研究将在智利的瓦尔帕莱索和圣地亚哥进行，那里最近卫生政策的变化引发了关于如何实践、优先处理和保护不同类型的权利的问题。研究人员将与利益相关者、非政府组织、医生和公共卫生官员、患者和政策制定者合作，研究这些不同的行为者如何在不断变化的政策背景下提出、联系和实施权利主张。数据将通过参与者观察、访谈、绘图和档案研究来收集。这项研究的结果将产生政策制定者和社会科学家所需的丰富的、多角度的数据，以了解影响公民身份体验和获得医疗保健的相互竞争的基于权利的框架。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.