MCL PI Dan Dohan will be presenting a talk for the Center for Ethnographic Research (CER) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Date & Time: September 19, 2024 4:00-5:30PM

Sponsors: Center for Ethnographic Research, Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Berkeley Public Health, Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley

Description: By the first decades of the twenty first century, cancer care in the United States reflected the maturation of three distinct movements. After decades of biomedical research, molecularly-targeted treatment had become routine. After multiple failed attempts, Obamacare expanded access to health insurance and health disparities became a legitimate focus of policy. Finally, universal adoption of the electronic health record made the corporatization of healthcare unavoidably tangible in everyday care. All three developments were championed by well-intentioned stakeholders in the profession, industry, and government who believed precision medicine and/or health equity and/or rationalized systems provided an authentic path to reduce cancer suffering. This talk examines how these three well-intentioned trends shaped experiences of people living with, caring for, and treating terminal cancer. I focus on how these factors shape processes of healing. In classical sociological theory, healing lends medicine its legitimacy. A re-consideration of the relationship between health, healing, and the culture of medicine is overdue. Using ethnographic data from nearly two decades of fieldwork, this talk examines how healing occurs in a healthcare system that would be biomedically, socially, and organizationally unrecognizable to the theorists who originally believed healing played a central role in social life.

Daniel Dohan is professor of health policy, surgery, and humanities and social sciences at the University of California San Francisco. He is a sociologist and ethnographer whose work examines the social and cultural dynamics of health and healthcare in a variety of clinical and community settings. He is the author of The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture in the Mexican-American Barrio, in addition to numerous journal articles. An NIH-funded investigator, Dan strives to bring sociological concepts and ethnographic methods to bear on practical challenges.

Admission Information:

Doors open at 3:30pm and close at 4:15pm. No admission after 4:15pm.

Contact Info:

cer@berkeley.edu 510-642-0813

Access Coordinator:
Maxwell Vanderwarker, maxwellvan@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0813

Image details: The healing story wall at the Mt. Zion Cancer Center, an installation by San Francisco artist and former patient Ann Chamberlain and designer Katsy Swan, features 500 tiles handmade by patients, their families and health care providers at the UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health.

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