“Health care policy is not just about the practicalities of provision; it is a stage upon which we negotiate larger questions of meaning, morality, and responsibility. ”
Health care has become a central arena of action in contemporary American life. The patient bedside is increasingly the location where the state, organizations, and individuals all enact claims about which problems matter and how they should be addressed. With US health care spending reaching $3.5 trillion in 2017, how these claims are negotiated has consequences beyond the medical encounter. As a scholar, I take the prominence of health care seriously, using its terrain to understand how regimes of inequality are reproduced through the social construction of problems, patients, and professionals.
I am a sociologist of medicine, work, and gender whose scholarship is motivated by three things: an empirical commitment to health care as a site of inquiry; a theoretical commitment to understanding the social processes that reproduce inequality in health care; and a methodological commitment to attending to how those processes are situated within and reproduced by interactions within the medical workplace. These commitments are grounded in the proposition that health care policy is not just about the practicalities of provision; it is a stage upon which we negotiate larger questions of meaning, morality, and responsibility.
news and notes
more than medicine wins Book prize
My book More than Medicine was awarded the 2022 British Sociological Association’s Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize.
Arlene Kaplan Daniels Paper Award
My 2017 Gender & Society paper, “Making a Career: Reproducing Gender within a Predominately Female Profession,” was awarded the 2018 Arlene Kaplan Daniels Award for the best published paper on Women and Social Justice.
Betty J. Cleckley Minority Issues Research Award
In 2016, I was awarded the American Public Health Association’s Aging and Public Health Section award for an early version of my paper “Religion as a Resource: Constructing identity and community within a non-residential long-term care institution.”
Contexts Magazine
My 2017 Gender & Society article, “Making a Career: Reproducing Gender within a Predominately Female Profession” was described in Contexts Magazine by Mary DeStefano in “Pushes and Pulls for Professional Women."
Gender & Society Blog
I describe the research from my 2017 Gender & Society article, “Making a Career: Reproducing Gender within a Predominately Female Profession” on the Gender & Society blog.