The Dynamics of Care in Urban Uganda: An Interactional Approach to Medicine

My PhD research investigates the construction of trust as a way of understanding how people in southwest Uganda navigate the quest for healing. While domestic and international health interventions emphasize biological, environmental and economic barriers to care, the subjective aspects of treatment are often overlooked. But social barriers - such as trust - matter profoundly, both for getting patients into clinics in the first place and for the quality of medical practice itself. Bringing together questions and methods from medical and linguistic anthropology, my fieldwork will analyze both how people talk about trust and the linguistic micro-production of trust in patient-provider interactions.