Everyday morality in community psychiatry
Milwaukee, WI (ongoing)
Ethnographic study of the social origins and everyday negotiations about morality by providers of community-based services for people with severe and persistent mental illness. Methods include participant observation of "assertive community treatment" programs: attending staff meetings, and accompanying case managers' to clients' homes, commitment hearings, meetings with psychiatrists, lawyers and family members, etc. This study explores how bioethics rhetoric shapes institutional arrangements as well as everday clinical practice. It clarifies the gap between formal bioethics and emergent moral concerns. It develops a practice- and performance-based theory of clinical bioethics: how clinicians use moral discourse to articulate the limits of expertise, the ambiguities of professional identity, and the micro-politics of medical work. At a broader level, this work asks how people fill the semantic space opened up by the word "ethics" and what they accomplish -- professionally and culturally -- by talking about the rightness or wrongness of clinical and research activities. (Funding pending)
Ethnicity, citizenship, family: identity after the Human Genome Project (2000-2002)
Co-principal investigator with an interdisciplinary team to explore ethical aspects of new genetic knowledge about ethnic, tribal, and national identity. Case studies include use of genetic tracing by American Indians for tribal status, by diasporic Jews for the right of return to Israel, and by African-Americans to trace connections with contemporary West African populations. Methods include interviewing American and British geneticists and facilitating inter-disciplinary seminars among genetics, bioethicists, philosophers, and individuals seeking genetic validation of identity claims. Funded by the National Institute of Health (National Human Genome Research Institute, program on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications).
