Winter Quarter 2018 events

Colin Halverson (Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University; PhD ’16)

Tentative Title: Translating Uncertainty in Diagnosis

Colin Halverson, a recent graduate of UChicago’s Anthropology PhD program, will present a preliminary version of his job talk for a TT in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

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The talk builds on his fieldwork in American medical genetics. Specifically, he analyzes the communication of uncertainty in diagnosis and the difficulties of maintaining a sense of tenuousness as diagnosis is translated from laboratory scientist to clinician to patient. How do claims to uncertainty interact with claims to expertise? How do different professional contexts condition presuppositions of certainty and truth? At the end of the talk, Colin turns to his new project regarding the effects of genetic reclassification on patients’ understanding of claims to scientific factuality. For instance, a patient is initially told she has a mutation that causes breast cancer, but then is given a revised report noting that the variant is no longer considered to be disease-causing.