Innovation in Asthma Research: Using Ethnography to Study a Global Health Problem (1 of 3)
Editor’s Note: Ethnography can be used to inform important health and policy decisions. But there are few public case studies that illustrate the value of ethnography for this specific context. When we learned about The Asthma Files, a project where ethnographers were not only gathering data to better understand asthma but also openly sharing the data, we became very excited to feature their work.
The Asthma Files was first envisioned in 2006 by Kim and Mike Fortun, who wanted to address the contested space of asthma research. One of Kim’s graduate students, Erik Bigras, became involved in the project in 2009. Although Erik’s original dissertation topic was on game design, his research evolved to include the Asthma Files as one of his fieldsites.
In the first post of their three-part series, Erik and Kim tell us about how they conceptualized The Asthma Files, why asthma deserves research attention from ethnographers, and how research data is shared on an open content management system.
Kim Fortun, a cultural anthropologist, is a professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at RPI. Her book Advocacy After Bhopal (Chicago, 2001) examines how different stakeholders understood and responded to the catastrophic chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984. She has also studied chronic, less obvious disasters linked to toxic chemicals.
Erik Bigras is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at RPI. As a graduate student, his work focuses on the production of technical legibility and subject effects in the arenas of air climate science and environmental governance.
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The Asthma Files
An anthropological project to understand how different communities and societies respond to complex problems.
An interdisciplinary project to advance understanding of asthma and environmental public health.Read More… Innovation in Asthma Research: Using Ethnography to Study a Global Health Problem (1 of 3)
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