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How does fairness come to be re-conceptualized in an aging society? Using the scarce resource of human organs as my example, this lecture explores what uses of the body and negotiations about the body can tell us about the growing tension between public health and public good on the one hand, and individual needs and rights on the other hand. To open up discussion and analysis of 'body work,' I ask, what is the cultural work that bodies do in post-industrial societies, in which aging populations create new needs and new demands on families, medicine and the state? The success of organ transplantation at older ages supports and feeds the ideas of limitless medical progress, ever-malleable bodies and open-ended life extension. Those ideas have become part of the fabric of social life in the US and elsewhere, with ramifications for the nature of altruism, care and social responsibility.
Sharon R. Kaufman is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Dept. of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has conducted research on identity and subjectivity, the changing culture of American medicine, the anthropology of 'life itself,' technologies of dying and life extension, the history and practice of informed consent, and risk assessment in relation to public anxieties about vaccine safety. She is currently investigating the ways in which longevity and longevity making are constituted by political, economic and bureaucratic forms and how the ethics that flow from institutional structures impact subjectivity, health policy in the U.S. and the uses of medical technologies around the world. She also conducts research on the ways in which risk assessment, trust in science and notions of expertise are changing in the contexts of controversies in bioscience and developments in evidence based medicine. In recent studies, she has been focusing on the ways in which 'ethics' comes to rest in health policies, medical institutions and health care finance mechanisms.
Recent publications include:
- "Medicare, Ethics and Reflexive Longevity: Governing time and treatment in an aging society," Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25:209-231, 2011;
- "Making longevity in an aging society: Linking Medicare policy and the new ethical field," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 53:407-424, 2010; and
- "Regarding the rise in autism: Vaccine safety doubt, conditions of inquiry and the shape of freedom," Ethos 38:8-32, 2010.
- Her most recent book is ...And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life (Scribner 2005; U. Chicago Press 2006).
She teaches graduate students at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley in the fields of anthropology, sociology, gerontology, public health and social welfare. She teaches in the School of Nursing and School of Medicine at UCSF. She mentors students, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty from a range of disciplines. |
