About Sutina
PhD Student, University of California San Francisco
I am a first-year sociology PhD student at UCSF, and I came to my current program by way of political science. My disciplinary leap was driven by a desire to focus more on interpretative approaches to social and political phenomena. I am fascinated by how people engage in meaning making, as well as how meanings are shared and shaped, especially at a global level. Recently, I’ve been learning how computational methods such as natural language processing, can benefit from and contribute to sociological inquiry, which motivated me to apply to the ADHHI.
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. Lately, international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) have begun acknowledging these “alternative” frameworks, which they term “traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine (TIC).” The WHO has integrated TIC 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. My project fills the gap by using archival data to generate a timeline of the WHO’s engagement with TIC. 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. Generating this historical narrative contributes to growing scholarship on the politics of knowledge and expertise in global health.