Patient Subjectivity
One of my main areas of interest is the impact of health and illness on how subjectivities are constituted. I have primarily explored this through my comparative work on childhood asthma, focusing on how global, reforms of health policies are redefining patienthood, in particular, how we allocate personal and collective responsibility over health, care, and the environment – and the effects of these changes on our experiences of self.
Currently, I am exploring various facets of patient subjectivity in my research on how young New Zealanders employ digital technologies to engage in a range of health activities, expanding our understandings of health to include optimizing our emotions, tending to our, and others’, mental wellbeing, and cultivating fitness and beauty.
PUBLICATIONS
2022. “Competing Responsibilities and the Ethics of Care in Young People’s Engagements
with Digital Mental Health.” The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Ed.
Maja Hojer Bruun, Ayo Wahlberg, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Cathrine Hasse, Klaus Hoeyer,
Dorthe Brogård Kristensen and Brit Ross Winthereik. Singapore: Springer Nature. Pp. 627-
646.
2021. “Multi-Sited Therapeutic Assemblages: Virtual and Real-Life Emplacement of
Youth Mental Health Support.” Social Science & Medicine. Vol. 278.
2021. “‘PM Me’ or ‘LOL’: Young Peoples’ Observations of Supportive and Unsympathetic Responses to Distress on Social Media.” Co-authored with Bilal Nasier and Kerry Gibson. Computers in Human Behavior. Vol. 124.
2019. “Young People’s Priorities for Support on Social Media: ‘It Takes Trust to Talk
about These Issues.’” Co-authored with Kerry Gibson. Computers in Human
Behavior. Vol 102: 238-247.
2019. “Patients, Pharmaceuticals, and Time: Reclaiming the Temporal Ambiguities of Illness and Healing through an Ethnographic Analysis of Asthma.” Cargo: Journal for Cultural and Social Anthropology. 2017(1-2): 1-18.
2017. “Diagnostic Refusals, Temporality, and Subjectivity among Non-compliant Sufferers of Asthma.” Subjectivity. DOI: 10.1057/s41286-017-0039-5
2017. “Efficacious Holidays: The Therapeutic Dimensions of Pleasure and Discipline in Czech Respiratory Spas.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 32(1):42-58.
2014. “Domestic Experiments: Familial Regimes of Coping with Childhood Asthma in New Zealand.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. 33(6): 546-560.
2012. w/L. McLaughlan. “Becoming ‘Half a Doctor’: Parent-experts and the Normalisation of Childhood Asthma in Aotearoa/New Zealand.” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. 9: 3-22.