The dissertation is an ethnographic study of religion as conceived and experienced by organ transplant recipients. It is also a cultural study of North America’s collective expressions of transplant as found in Christian journals, popular media, advocacy literature and public policy statements. The study finds evidence that religious metaphors and directives, cosmological figures and theological arguments, rituals, scriptures and places of worship are actively, vociferously, and consciously engaged with organ transplant discourse and with the experience of giving or receiving organs. While the transplant recipients under study cannot be considered representative (being largely advocates for transplant and almost exclusively of Christian background or affiliation), this group was articulate about the ways their new organ invoked the sacred: they described new metaphysical understandings, they spoke of a closer relationship with God, the universe and other human beings, they divulged inexplicable incidents and mystical states of being, they articulated a complex set of ethical prescripts. “Thinking how many times you should have been dead and you’re still here” was for many an imperative to “start to find out why.” I argue that these spiritual seekers traverse a 21st century terrain shaped by the practices and discourses of what Foucault termed “biopower”. The private and public production of sanctified donors and ‘redeemed’ recipients is inextricably bound to the desires of transplant professionals and government officials, and cannot hope to escape the very real commodification of the body that transplant represents. This seeming paradox of ‘the sacred in the secular’ does not make transplant’s religious constructions inauthentic or irrelevant. Religion remains an active and inventive register for the recording of potent bodily experiences of illness, loss and conditional regeneration. Further, the religious activity around transplant affords a window on emerging rites, on contemporary understandings of death and immortality, and on new conversations about miracles and morality. Circuits of biotechnology are not immune to religious influence and inflection – but, simultaneously, contemporary religious meanings, practices and experiences are indelibly shaped by our newfound ability to transplant organs.

Introduction: In the palliative care literature there has been debate over the occurrence and the desirability of the rationalization of palliative care. The discussion is based mostly on opinion, anecdote and argument. Little discussion is based on research, or is specific to Canada. Considering this question of rationalization, this thesis asks whether Canadian palliative care ethics has changed, and if so in what regard. Methods: Discourse analysis was used to evaluate texts and interviews from early and late Canadian palliative care. Based on expression, influence and comprehensiveness, two key texts were identified from each of the early and late periods of palliative care. Ten interviews were conducted with Canadian palliative care pioneers practicing across these periods. These interviews were semi-structured, and were based on the background literature and the textual analysis. Results: Analysis of the textual data led to the descriptive themes of person, profession and well-being. These themes, when compared across the early and late periods, generated three themes of process. Analysis of the interview data generated three similar themes of process. The themes of process from the textual and interview data were similar enough to generate three overall themes of process – routinization, medicalization, and professionalization.

Introduction: In the palliative care literature there has been debate over the occurrence and the desirability of the rationalization of palliative care. The discussion is based mostly on opinion, anecdote and argument. Little discussion is based on research, or is specific to Canada. Considering this question of rationalization, this thesis asks whether Canadian palliative care ethics has changed, and if so in what regard. Methods: Discourse analysis was used to evaluate texts and interviews from early and late Canadian palliative care. Based on expression, influence and comprehensiveness, two key texts were identified from each of the early and late periods of palliative care. Ten interviews were conducted with Canadian palliative care pioneers practicing across these periods. These interviews were semi-structured, and were based on the background literature and the textual analysis. Results: Analysis of the textual data led to the descriptive themes of person, profession and well-being. These themes, when compared across the early and late periods, generated three themes of process. Analysis of the interview data generated three similar themes of process. The themes of process from the textual and interview data were similar enough to generate three overall themes of process – routinization, medicalization, and professionalization.

Se hizo una revisión de la literatura publicada sobre el origen de la sociología médica y su campo de acción. Para ello, se analizaron diversas publicaciones y se resumieron los aspectos más relevantes. A pesar de que la enfermedad siempre ha estado ligada a aspectos socioculturales, recién a mediados del siglo XX, la medicina reconoce la importancia de la sociología en la explicación de temas relacionados a la salud, especialmente para explicar los determinantes sociales de la salud. En la actualidad, los sociólogos trabajan de manera multidisciplinaria con médicos para investigar y analizar cuestiones concernientes a la salud de las personas, para mejorar el bienestar y la calidad de vida de la población. En este sentido, el aporte de la sociología no solo ha enriquecido la comprensión de algunas enfermedades, sino también diferentes aspectos en el quehacer de la medicina. / Revisión por pares / Revisón por pares

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation analyzes how medical tourism in Thailand impacts and involves kathoey, a Thai third gender group. As the Thai state launched in 2016 an economic plan centered on technological growth and medical tourism, kathoey entertainers – many who have undergone gender-affirming surgeries – are being used as a symbol of medical technologies to attract foreign currency and potential medical tourists. Their work in the entertainment industry also contributes to national rebranding efforts by shifting Thailand’s historical reputation as a sex tourist hub to one of medical expertise and professionalized labor. Through the concept of the gendered technostate, I show how states, gendered labor, and technologies are co-constructed via technologically-enhanced gendered labor, that is both produced by and contributing to state agendas. Within the context of state-led efforts to advance technological growth and medical tourism, I illustrate how local people co-construct a global medical market, affording the nation new levels of prestige. The dissertation analyzes local health effects of medical tourism, developing the sociology of trans-national health, a framework which accounts for the political and economic aspects of health and health care across borders of sex, gender, and nation. The project elucidates the cultural economy of medical tourism and the local gendered relations that undergird transnational health practices. It demonstrates how transgender people are incorporated into the state as professionalized citizens, thereby illuminating the role of the state in producing and legitimizing bodies to become particular configurations of sex, gender, and labor. / 2022-02-10T00:00:00Z

First described by physician William Dietz in 1995, the "Food Insecurity-Obesity Paradox" (FIOP) attempts to explain the biology and behaviors of people who are simultaneously overweight and food-insecure. I was introduced to this theory as a Behavioral Health graduate student and, in that context, was taught to understand it as a fact. My personal experiences as a Black woman, however, alongside ongoing engagement with Black feminist thought and critical medical sociology, have taught me otherwise. This disssertation takes Dietz's theory as a starting point in order to argue that Black women in the US experience fatphobic and racial discrimination while being "cared for" by western institutional medicine. I argue that discourses like the FIOP, though framed as benevolent clinical theories, do more harm than good: not only do they multiply pathologize so-called "fat" Black women by drawing on disparaging stereotypes, but they simultaneously ignore the specific health and wellness needs that emerge at the intersection of weight, size, skin color, gender, ability, and economic class. My broader dissertation project is an interdisciplinary critique of pathologizing discourses about Black women, including medically "legitimate" ones like the FIOP. Via critical analysis of these discourses, and employing Black feminist and medical sociological perspectives, I explore how stereotypes of Black women correlate with how these women are perceived and treated by physicians and other health professionals. These racialized perceptions and forms of discriminatory medical treatment are instances of what has been labeled, variously, as a racial formation (Omi and Winant, 1997), a matrix of domination (Patricia Hill Collins, 1990) and a racial ideology (Feagin, 2006). These processes are further extended by physicians who use these pathologizing discourses and practices to advance their own careers. Black feminist theorists have described the multiple marginalizations experienced by contemporary Black women in the US and my project places weight and body size within this marginalizing dynamic. After tracing the long history of medical "othering" of Black women by science, I show the persistence of these ideologies in contemporary medical practice. My interviews with Black women investigate their lived experiences of these ideologies and practices, and allow women to speak for themselves in a space that so often speaks for them. / Doctor of Philosophy / Black women's historical experiences in the US, including my own story, are akin to what Black feminist Melissa Harris-Perry in her book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (2011), calls the crooked room. Applying Harris-Perry's theorization of the crooked room to how medical institutions operate to cause Black thick women to be so quickly categorized as diseased, I have developed the concept of the Crooked Room of Medicine (CRoM) to describe the mental, emotional, and physical struggles Black women face at the intersection of race and gender stereotypes and false narratives particularly in medical settings. I utilize and build upon Black feminist theoretical frameworks as well as my own personal narrative to investigate how a society that is built on racialized and gendered systems has implications for how the large Black female body is interpreted as unhealthy and diseased when treated within these social and medical settings. Building on Tressie McMillan Cottom's scholarship, I utilize a methodology of what I call Thick Studies to develop a Gender Race Weight (GRW) matrix from the crooked room of medicine, to map out our experiences and develop a theory that focuses on healing. The result of Black women's disproportionately poor health outcomes is a result of a complex environment of barriers from quality health care, to racism, and stress correlated with the distinct social experiences of Black womanhood in U.S. society (Chinn. Martin, Redmond 2021). The heaviness of generational racialized trauma is still in our DNA (Degruy-Leary 2017). Racism and gender discrimination have profound impacts on the well-being of Black women. I argue for a holistic health treatment that addresses mind, body, emotion, and spirit and for an acknowledgement of Black women's knowledge of health and healing in relation to Black women, weight, and medical space.