Faculty and Researchers with STS Interests - Profile

Sharon Kaufman
Professor, Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine
Professor, Institute for Health and Aging
Professor, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences
University of California, San Francisco


Email: sharon.kaufman@ucsf.edu

Sharon Kaufman is Professor of Medical Anthropology (in Residence) in the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco. She has several lines of inquiry: 1) identity and how it is produced, contested and negotiated, for example, among the very old, frail and demented, in the context of illness, within health care bureaucracy, and for persons who are neither “dead” nor “alive” but are maintained by medical technologies; and at the site of cultural formations of “old age,” “the person,” and “the human.” 2) the culture of medicine, including the evolution of goals, values, ethics in medical practice and research; the ways in which health care delivery systems and biotechnologies are changing understandings of “illness,” “the patient,” “life extension” and “life enhancement;” the relationship of clinical practice to biomedical research; the changing nature of medical responsibility and the doctor-patient relationship; the discursive biomedical enterprise as one source of subjectification. 3) the ways in which cultural narratives and rhetoric -- about individualism, dignity and suffering for example --can be used to think about the boundaries of the moral and the practical in medicine, and how they operate as “background” assumptions through which individual stories and societal discourses are lived, constructed, and told. 4) the anthropology of “life itself,” that is, the fact that all kinds of life forms (such as, the gene, the stem cell, the embryo, the fetus, the disabled, the comatose, the demented, the old) are culturally malleable and negotiable, the result of scientific manipulation, market pressures, commodification and political debate, and the ways in which medical, legal, religious and commercial forces are brought to bear on the meaning and value of those life forms.

Website: http://nurseweb.ucsf.edu/iha/faculty/kaufman.htm

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