Paul Brodwin
Office: Sabin 180
Phone: (414) 229-4734
e-mail: brodwin@uwm.edu
Degree: Ph.D. Harvard University, 1991
Curriculum Vitae: Vita (pdf 81K)
Research Interests:
Contemporary bioethics as a social movement and cultural discourse.
I am currently conducting a multi-year study, funded by the NSF, on "everyday ethics" in American community psychiatry. Ever since deinstitutionalization in the 1960s, most severely mentally ill individuals receive treatment in community settings. Front-line clinicians face difficult moral dilemmas: caring for patients who mistrust the mental health system, persuading or coercing patients to accept treatment, and acting as gatekeepers to scarce medical and financial resources. My ethnography of an Assertive Community Treatment program explores how clinicians articulate the morally salient dimensions of their work, negotiate conflicts with patients, adapt formal ethics codes to shifting everyday realities, and construct ethical selves in the midst of everyday work tasks. This research advances the social science critique of bioethics by drawing upon practice theory as well as science and technology studies. Previous research on bioethics concerned identity politics and the emergence of ethical regulation in human population genetics, funded by the NIH (see publications, below).
Marginality and morality. Fieldwork during the 1990s with Haitians migrants in Guadeloupe, French West Indies, demonstrated the use of moral condemnation (by both marginalized and dominant groups) to consolidate the boundaries and self-image of that diaspora community. Current research explores concerns the history of morality as a topic in British, French, and American anthropology; the cross-talk between applied ethics and anthropological theory; and the relevance of ethnographic methods for the study of morality in everyday life as well as restricted occupational fields.
Selected Publications:
2000 Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics. Paul Brodwin, editor. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press (Theories of Contemporary Culture, No. 25).
1996 Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, No. 3)
1992 Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives. M. Good, P. Brodwin, B. Good, and A. Kleinman, editors. Berkeley: University of California Press (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care).
Articles
2005 - "Bioethics in Action" and Human Population Genetics Research. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 29: 145 -178.
Article text (pdf-155k)
2003 - Pentecostalism in Translation: Religion and the Production of Community in the Haitian Diaspora. American Ethnologist, 30 (1), February, 2003.
2002 - Genetics, Identity, and the Anthropology of Essentialism. Anthropological Quarterly, 75 (2): pp. 323-330.
www.uwm.edu/~brodwin/AnthroQuart1.PDF
2001 - Pluralism and Politics in Global Bioethics Education. The Annals of Behavioral Science and Medical Education. Vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 80-86.
www.uwm.edu/~brodwin/educ.PDF
2000 - Professional power and the cultural meanings of biotechnology. Co-authored with Robert M. Nelson. In The Encyclopedia of Ethical, Legal, and Policy Issues in Biotechnology (Vol. 2), ed. by Thomas H. Murray and Maxwell J. Mehlman. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Pp. 888-896.
To order books:
Medicine and Morality in Haiti (Cambridge, 1996)
Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Indiana, 2000)
Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives (California, 1992)
