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Ian Whitmarsh, PhD
Medical Anthropology
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B.A., Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley (1998)
Ph.D., Anthropology, Princeton University (2005)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Carolina Center for Genome Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2005-2007)
Postdoctoral Associate, Science, Technology, and Society Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007-2008)
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, University of California San Francisco (2008-)
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Whitmarsh, Ian Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Whitmarsh, Ian Biomedical Ambivalence: Asthma Diagnosis, the Pharmaceutical, and other Contradictions in Barbados. American Ethnologist, 35(1): 49-63, 2008.
Whitmarsh, Ian, Arlene Davis, Debra Skinner, and Donald Bailey. A Place for Genetic Uncertainty: Parents Valuing an Unknown in the Meaning of Disease. Social Science and Medicine (65): 1082-1093, 2007.
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Cultures of science and technology;
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Medical articulations of gender and ethnicity;
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Internationalization of the biosciences;
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Vernaculars of biomedicine
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ONGOING RESEARCH AND TRAINING
My research explores tensions in the uses of biomedical categories linking race and disease among researchers, medical practitioners, government officials, and patients. I have carried out ethnographic research following a US-based asthma genetics study conducted in Barbados, exploring how the study is creating new regimes of care, state interventions, and unexpected biomedical diagnostics. In collaboration with researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, I have also explored the significance of ambiguity in genetic discourses through research with families of children diagnosed with either Fragile X, Klinefelter or Turner syndromes in North Carolina. We are currently exploring the significance of receiving a genetic diagnosis without knowing the condition was a possible result of the test.
My current research is in the Caribbean and the US on the emerging biomedical category of the metabolic syndrome, a diagnostic that links diabetes, obesity, abnormal cholesterol, and hypertension as risk factors for heart disease. The syndrome is considered more prevalent among Hispanic and African American women, making gender and ethnicity critical to the new scientific object. I am exploring the use of this category among researchers, medical practitioners, and patients in the US and the Caribbean to see the formation of state responsibilities and patient identities around the medical designation. This work continues my research into the ways vernaculars of ethnicity, gender, and illness influence and are reshaped by the expansion of bioscience into new health conditions and across national borders.
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Anthropology, History & Social Medicine
3333 California Street, Suite 485 Box 0850
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-0850
Phone 415-476-6164
Fax 415-476-6715
E-mail
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