Environmental justice communities in the US are located at a nexus of social justice, political and corporate interest, and public health. This paper explores how resident activists, primarily those who identify as Latinx and female, simultaneously inhabit roles of resident and activist. In doing so, they create a space of equitable knowledge exchange, and support community members in realizing their own agency. Additionally, their efforts include, but are not limited to, collaboration with researchers in a way that promotes emancipatory education and culture-centered research models. The author spent over a year as a staff member of an urban EJ organization in Massachusetts, participating in and observing community meetings, fundraising efforts, municipal and state level environmental impact hearings, and organized protests. These community activists wrestle with the tension of simultaneously depending on and disrupting systems that have historically burdened their community.

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. / This dissertation attempts to document the social life of Indian generic pharmaceuticals within the broader material culture of pharmaceuticals in Johannesburg. Foregrounding the question of value created in circulation, the study explores how conduits of generic pharmaceutical flow are saturated with the global politics of humanitarianism, locally embedded profitmaking efforts by businesspersons based on risk, cultural moorings of pharmaceutical relations, and historical specificities of locations in which pharmaceuticals have been mobilized for consumption. The central method is the ethnography of circulation. By documenting the ‘moral claims’ of Indian pharma capital as manifested in the public culture of pharmaceutical business, the discussion places the intersectionality of moral and material transactions at the centrestage of pharmaceutical sales and the creation of value / MT2017

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This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the experiences of men living with and dying from serious illness in prison, with a particular focus on the kinds of care they receive and the ways in which they experience that care. The dissertation draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted over two years in U.S. state prisons in Maine, presented in three standalone papers. The first paper outlines how the prison and its health care system shape the illness experiences of older and ageing prisoners and asks, what does it mean when the lives of prisoners collide with contracted for-profit medical care and how might their lives be constituted as unworthy of care? The stakes lie in applied policy and practical solutions for custodial services. The second paper explores the experience of caring and being cared for in the context of a prison hospice program, in which incarcerated men provide care to peers who are ill or dying. Through tracing one man’s end of life journey, this chapter considers how hospice caring makes and remakes death and life in prison, and the ways in which this “nefarious” form of escape from disciplinary power translates in the repressive penal regime. The final paper has its roots in sensory ethnography and the emerging field of sensory penality. This is a reflexive piece in which I probe my sensorial subjectivity and particularly touch as a medium of inquiry to explore the sensations of life, death, and dis/connection experienced in a prison infirmary. The observed feel of life and death illuminates new ways of understanding care in custody as a space of simultaneous brutality, beauty, indignity and intimacy. Taken together, the papers shed light on constellations of care in prison, the contingency of relations and personhood, and points of friction between care and custody. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / At a time when the prison population is rapidly ageing and more people than ever are dying in custody, this thesis explores what it is like to experience serious or terminal illness in prison, the kinds of care prisoners receive and how they experience that care. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in U.S. state prisons, three themes are examined: 1) how the prison and its privatized health care system shape the illness experiences of older prisoners; 2) how prisoners mediate the experience of dying in prison through a peer- based prison hospice program; and 3) how the senses and especially touch elicit new ways of knowing and understanding end of life in prison. Taken together, the three papers shed light on forms of care in prison, the mutability of relations and life, and points of friction between care and custody.

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Malaria är ett globalt problem, som framförallt existerar i de tropiska delarna av världen. I Uganda uppskattas 25-40% av patienter som uppsöker statlig vård vara patienter som har relaterade malaria symtom. Eftersom Batwa är en minoritetsgrupp som skiljer sig från övriga Ugandier i sin historiska livsstil, undersöker denna studie hur denna grupp söker vård. Studien är kvalitativ och har använt sig av en etnografisk metod, därav tio intervjuer och en fokusgrupp diskussion för att samla data. Det teoretiska ramverket har varit medicinsk antropologiskt, där en hälsouppsökande modell har använts. Resultatet visar på en mängd olika hälsoalternativ för Batwa att söka vård inom. Dock skiljer sig Batwas hälsouppsökande beteenden från andra gruppers beteenden, enligt tidigare studier, och från det teoretiska ramverkets modell, som använts i uppsatsen. Batwa föredrar offentlig vård i högre grad, eftersom det är ett billigare och ett mer lättillgängligt alternativ att bli frisk på, i jämförelse med många andra alternativ. / Malaria is a global problem that exists mostly in the tropical region of the world. In Uganda approximately 25-40% of the patients who are seeking governmental healthcare are patients with malaria related symptoms. Because Batwa is a minority group who differ from other Ugandans in their historical lifestyle, the present study investigates how this group are seeking healthcare. The study is qualitative and has used an ethnographic method, whereby ten interviews and one focus-group discussion to collect data. The theoretical framework has been medical anthropology, where a healthcare seeking model has been used. The result reveals a varied spectrum of healthcare option for Batwa too seek treatment within. However, Batwa healthcare seeking behaviour differs from other groups of healthcare seeking behaviour, according to earlier studies, and from the model used in the theoretical framework in the present study. Batwa prefer governmental healthcare in a greater extent, because it is cheaper and a more accessible alternative to get treated, compared to many of the other alternatives.

Using Scheper-Hughes and Locke's "Mindful Body" (1987) as a theoretical framework, this thesis seeks to examine how Alzheimer's disease (1) impacts Chinese and Taiwanese American elders and their caregivers, (2) is felt through the relationships and social interactions of the Chinese and Taiwanese American individuals interviewed, and (3) is experienced through the complex overlapping of culture, politics, and institutions in Boston and beyond. In order to understand the impact of Alzheimer's disease on Chinese and Taiwanese American families living in Boston, qualitative interviews of health care professionals, community members, Chinese and Taiwanese American elderly, and Alzheimer's disease caregivers were conducted and analyzed. Furthermore, participant observation at a Chinese American adult day health center, dementia review meetings, and various public lectures on Alzheimer's disease and the Chinese and Taiwanese American communities were attended. This case study demonstrates that for the Chinese and Taiwanese American communities, Alzheimer's disease is a social disease. It exists within family relationships of elder and caregiver, and for families, it is the gradual degeneration of these relationships that is at the heart of meaning of this illness' lived-experience.

Smartphone technology has transformed the process by which women understand themselves, manage their care decisions and access health information, while also creating a space for more integrated and individualized understandings of wellness. Using exploratory, semi-structured interviews (n = 27) and observation of phone use, this study examines how minority women in Boston engage with smartphones through health-related mobile applications and web searches. Drawing upon postphenomenology, I examine the way smartphones have become both a regulatory force and motivational tool in the formation of self. I argue that the integration of smartphones into user identity positions them as the primary entryway for health decision-making (Garro, 1986, 1998) and patient-clinician interactions.

This project emerges from engaging and studying the lives, including mine, of the many who go—and stay—crazy. Here, I explore the kinds of existences that those impaired by severe and persistent mental illness(es), what I refer to henceforth as “chronic mental illness”— have had (or been able) to forge and leverage, as well as some of the resources and structures they have developed/manipulated in order to do so. This thesis explores one way in which chronically mentally ill people exact agency over their own embattled personhood. The term “personhood” draws from existential traditions in philosophy and theology (Strawson 1959; Taylor 1989, 127-142; Rosfort 2018), though I understand and use it here as it is relevant to phenomenological psychopathology. By “personhood”, I mean the normative traits of a society wherein individuals are recognized by seemingly “common” traits of humanity. While there is not, as philosopher Robert Spaemann contends, “a [single] characteristic that can be called ‘being a person’” (Spaemann 1996, 14), to understand human beings (being) is to also grapple with the ethical demands of intentionality, autonomy, experience, and subjectivity. By “subjectivity”, I refer to the innumerable and descriptive components that comprise individual, relational, and intersubjective experience(s). These components, and how they are known and described, emerges from a self-awareness in maneuvering the world and, consequently, developing a particular lifeworld. My interests in personhood and subjectivity emerge from the assumption that “the fragility of human identity is rooted in the various ways in which our biology challenges our experience of being an autonomous self” (Ricoeur 1966; Ricoeur 1970, 472; Rosfort 2018, 5). Part of what complicates personal identity is the impossibility of grounding personhood in either biological otherness or an intrinsic, pre-reflective selfhood. Being a person is “the task of becoming […] concrete […] through the constant encounter with the otherness that is an inescapable part of one’s identity” (Rosfort 2018, 6). Seeing a person, Ricoeur believes, requires the perpetual examination of experiential tensions among identity traits that go beyond biological reductionism and constancy. Illness narratives are useful tools for understanding the extent to which disability incites a fundamental interrogation of the self, as well as a reckoning of practices of self-recognition and phenomenological metamorphosis. This multi-field site investigation engages self-identifying psychiatrically disabled people via participant-observation at three peer support networks within the greater Boston area. Data, by way of stories recounted and collected, is framed by my own lived experience participating in similar structures, both in-person and online. Stories from both occasions, including interview data and media analysis, are relayed as means of triangulation. This project relies on sociologist Noman Denzin’s concept of “cumulative epiphanies” (Denzin 1989), or, moments wherein ill authors/speakers recognize the extent to which their personhood was honed through the medium of the illness itself (Frank 1993, 46). In large part, this project explores ways that people experiencing disabling effects of mental illness learn to take care of themselves. It pays particular attention to how the personal views of people with such illnesses shape the construction and layout of varied peer support networks. Although it considers general psychiatric practice involving prescribing clinicians (e.g., physician or nurse practitioner) and non-prescribing clinicians (e.g., talk therapists), the central objective is to consider the emergence of mutual support, or “self-help” models, as a mode of constructing a new sense of self/advocating for unmet needs within traditional medical practice. More broadly, this project maps the reflexive transformation(s) of person into patient and the varied methods of healing and treatment that the chronically mentally ill utilize in such contexts. It considers the emergence of PSNs as a counter/cultural borderland (Kleinman 1980; Garcia 2016) between the social “psy”ences (Matza 2013; Raikhel & Bemme 2016) and psychiatry. As a theoretical fusion of history of psychiatry, sociology of mental health, and phenomenology, I trouble the parameters within which PSNs and their participants help craft, shape, and directing a particular kind of experience of mental illness, suffering, and/or convalescence.