About Sutina
PhD Student, University of California San Francisco
I am a second-year student in the Sociology PhD program at UCSF. My current research integrates medical sociology, global historical sociology, and science and technology studies to understand the politics of expertise and authority in global health organizations. I am interested in how and why people engage in meaning-making, as well as how meanings are shared and shaped, especially at a global level. Recently, I’ve been learning more about how computational methods such as natural language processing can benefit from and contribute to sociological inquiry, which motivated me to apply to the ADHHI. I am excited to learn more about how to integrate digital health humanities into interpretative approaches to understanding social and political phenomena.
About Sutina’s project
Although biomedicine currently dominates the field of global health, history shows that communities have practiced and continue to practice alternative modes of healing globally. In the last decade, international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) have more actively begun acknowledging these “alternative” frameworks, which they term “traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine (TCI).” The WHO has integrated TCI into its policy and practice by standardizing and benchmarking systems like Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine. However, this development is recent and there is little work documenting and analyzing the organization’s previous stances on this topic. This project fills the gap by using archival data to generate a timeline of the WHO’s engagement with TCI. Through sentiment and keyword analysis, I trace and explain change over time in the WHO’s perspective on non-biomedical approaches to health and illness. In generating this historical narrative, I contribute to a growing body of scholarship on the politics of knowledge and expertise in global health.