Post-Doc, Interdisciplinary Studies, Science Technology and Society
About
I am trained as a medical anthropologist and conduct both academic and applied health services research.
Presently I consult for an empirically-based interdisciplinary team research project whose goal is to develop a gender-sensitive HIV prevention program for urban African-American adolescents. Specifically, I am analyzing interview data to understand the relationships between neighborhood violence, familial adaptations to it, and sexual debut.
A second consulting project draws on qualitative interviews with IRB Chairs across the U.S. to examine how they evaluate ethically questionable mental health research protocols. I joined the project as a data analyst, and am presently the lead author on a paper analyzing how IRB Chairs assess the use of monetary and non-monetary incentives in survey-based research with homeless adults (with P.I. Joe Catania).
I have wide-ranging knowledge of qualitative research methods and data analysis, and growing knowledge of program evaluation.
I have experience in health services research related to clinical and ethical decision-making, health care organizations, chronic illness, substance use, mental illness, sexuality and sexual health and healthcare disparities.
My anthropological interests include U.S. biomedicine, gender, knowledge practices/diagnosis, visuality, affect, kinship and kinds, mental illness and neurology.
My ethnographic and historically-based dissertation examines the messy relations between categories of pseudoseizure/hysteria and epilepsy in the United States, focusing on the clinical, socio-technical and ethical work practices neurologists use to assign patients these diagnoses. Pseudoseizure (a.k.a. non-epileptic seizure) is primarily diagnosed among poor, educationally disadvantaged women, often with a history of sexual or physical trauma. I am interested in how visual images and tropes of objectivity are used to construct some patients as modern neoliberal subjects and to exclude others.
Contact Information
| IM: | skype alex.choby |
