Janelle S. Taylor (PhD 1999, Chicago)
Research Interests:
Medicine and medical education, dementia, technology, commodification and consumer culture, reproduction, science studies; US
“As a sociocultural anthropologist I use ethnographic methods to study illness and medicine as part of social life. My research over the past decade has focused on a variety of topics relating to medical technology, medical education, and medical practice, including fetal ultrasound imaging, medical decision-making at the end of life, and how 'culture' is understood and taught within medical education. I am currently actively pursuing two different research directions. Both projects examine how persons get represented within U.S. biomedicine, and consider the social, cultural, and political as well as clinical consequences that follow from these processes of representation.
The first project, focused on medical education, examines the recent rise and current practice of standardized patient performances (i.e. staged clinical encounters with actors who role-play patients) in the training and assessment of health care professionals. One article based on this research has appeared thus far, in the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, as part of a special issue on “ethnographies of clinical training.”
The second research direction concerns dementia, with a focus on medical research and care practices, and has yielded several publications. One is a well-received essay on recognition, caring and dementia that was published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly (and reprinted in the volume Care in Practice). A short essay exploring the limits as well as the importance of words has appeared in Anthropology Now. A major article (coauthored with three geriatrician colleagues) documenting and discussing the exclusion of people with dementia from research studies in the field of geriatric medicine, recently appeared in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. I will soon be undertaking a new ethnographic research project focused on friendship and dementia, with support from the Fetzer Institute.
Common to all these projects, different as they are, is a concern to document and understand how "persons" are socially made (and unmade), how representations relate to social practices, and how mediation happens between distinct systems of value."
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Selected Publications: |
2012 |
"The Disappearing Subject: Exclusion of People with Cognitive Impairment and Dementia from Geriatrics Research" JS Taylor, SM DeMers, EK Vig, S Borson. Journal of the American Geriatrics Association 60:413-419. |
2011 |
"Beyond Words: Traces of Meaning in an Abandoned Kitchen," Anthropology Now 3(2):62-64. |
2011 |
"The Moral Aesthetics of Simulated Suffering in Standardized Patient Performances," Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 35(2):134-162. |
2010 |
“Why Don’t Patients Enroll in Hospice? Can We Do Anything About It?” EK Vig, HS Starks, JS Taylor, EK Hopley, K Fryer-Edwards, Journal of General Internal Medicine 25(10):1009-1019. |
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2008 |
The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction. Rutgers University Press. |
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2008 |
"On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia." Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22(4):313-335. Reprinted 2010 in the volume Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, ed. Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript Verlag |
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2006 |
“Beyond Substituted Judgment: How Surrogates Navigate End-of-Life Decision-making.” EK Vig, JS Taylor, HS Starks, EM Hopley, K Fryer-Edwards. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 54(11):1688-1693 |
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2005 |
"Surfacing the Body Interior", Annual Reviews in Anthropology 34: 741-756. |
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2004 |
Consuming Motherhood, co-edited with Linda Layne and Danielle Wozniak. Rutgers University Press. |
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2003 |
"The Story Catches You and You Fall Down: Tragedy, Ethnography, and 'Cultural Competence'", Medical Anthropology Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2 (June). |
Last Update: October 2011
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