Identifier: TDX:2823
Authors: Ventura Garcia, Laia
Abstract:
The analysis of the scientific and technical conceptualization of latent risk and that of the experience of women who have migrated from Bolivia and who currently live in Catalonia questions the distinction and the limits between expert and lay knowledge and practices. The research combines a classic ethnographic method with other paths of knowledge, where the experiences and the corporality of the researcher are included as a methodological tool, leading to an emphasis on emotions and risk articulations. Taking this into consideration, I delve into the cultures of risk that emerge from specific contexts and which are based on different ways of knowing; and, in addition, I examine in depth the articulation of preventive and therapeutic practices that stem from this, producing new and dynamic corporalities. The analysis demonstrates that talking about risk means making reference to positioned bodies, porous to the social world in which they are embedded. On the one hand, while in the biomedical field risk is based on statistic principles, which are reinterpreted in the clinical field, for women risk responds to identities, structural positions and biographical experiences where emotions play a central role, understood as the result of the embodiment of relational processes and synthesized in the emic concept of suffering. On the other hand, whilst in the scientific and technical field emotions are considered an impediment, women’s narratives allow the establishment of articulations with the social world from the production and reproduction of corporalities arising from within the interrelationship between, for example, the diagnosis and health monitoring processes, migratory goals, pharmaceuticals or the curtains of vinchuca bugs swarming down the walls of dwellings. Finally, I consider the transdisciplinary approach to be the one best able to address Chagas disease as a biosocial phenomenon in all its complexity.
Repositori URV