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Katherine Darling |
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01.02.2017-30.03.2017
Chronic Crisis: Managing HIV as a Chronic Illness in US Biomedical Bureaucracies
Katherine Weatherford Darling is a sociologist working across the boundaries of the sociology of health, illness and disability, and feminist science studies. She is Assistant Director of Research and Academic Programs at the Science and Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz, where she is also appointed as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department. Kate cares about bringing social justice and health inequalities to the center of discussions about the ethics and politics of biomedicine. Her research examines how chronic illness and complex disease are transformed by biomedical science and health policy in the U.S. In her forthcoming dissertation (2016), she asks what it means for HIV to be defined, managed and experienced as a chronic illness in U.S. healthcare and policy. She ethnographically traces how people living with HIV and their healthcare providers are navigating biomedical bureaucracies, grappling with new insurance markets and attempting to control healthcare costs. Adele Clarke, Janet Shim, Howard Pinderhughes and Jenny Reardon serve on her dissertation committee. Kate began her training in at UC Berkeley in the College of Natural Resources, where she studied Molecular Environmental Biology and volunteered at a feminist health clinic. She studied abroad in Santiago, Chile and then investigated the health effects of air pollution in New York City at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. While a doctoral student at UC San Francisco, she collaborated on research projects at UCSF and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Through these collaborations, she has examined concepts of race/ethnicity in gene-environment interaction research, the history of race in genetics after World War II, and new frameworks for examining implicated values in biomedical research.
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