Hello, and welcome to my website!
My scholarship investigates how discrimination is written on the body, the effect of medicalization and racialized care on health, the process (and effects) of medical decision- making, and how everyday practices, institutional processes, and provider biases shape medical care and reproduce social inequality. I ask how institutional and obstetric violence (maternal mistreatment during childbirth) are threaded—intentionally, unintentionally, or structurally—through the medical system. I explicitly examine variation in medical care in relation to social inequality, asking which bodies receive what kinds of medical intervention.
I have addressed these questions through three interrelated projects in Mexico, the U.S., and Kenya examining (a) the process by which callous care and obstetric violence emerge in medical encounters, (b) how values of medical institutions become embodied in medical practice among doctors, and (c) the effect of patient social background and hospital structure on medical decisions. The driving premise of my work is that an understanding of medical decision-making can alleviate problems in health care delivery.