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

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Chronically Normal: How Biomedical Knowledge is Used in Everyday Life This 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.