I’m Lindsay (they/them), a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in Sociology. Broadly, my research program focuses on how healthcare institutions, knowledge about bodies, and experiences of suffering and illness change in relation to one another. My current research focuses on how uncertainty associated with many chronic illnesses (e.g. chronic fatigue, cluster headaches, post-traumatic stress disorder, fibromyalgia, polycystic ovarian syndrome) affects healthcare and social welfare institutions, as well as the lives of sufferers. This research takes an intersectional perspective, looking at how factors like gender, race, and class interact to affect how these chronic illnesses are understood, treated, and experienced. My work is aimed both at creating new knowledge about an often misunderstood topic and set of sufferers, as well as locating and targeting interventions to improve care and well-being.
My next research project uses 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2017) at an academic medical institution’s integrative medicine center to investigate how non-biomedical paradigms of healthcare (e.g. Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, pan-American herbalist traditions) are interacting with biomedicine to produce new understandings of illness, health, healing, and the body.
Feel free to contact me: lberkowitz@berkeley.edu