Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

memory, knowledge, and understanding remain intact. We are doing participant observationin patients' homes and other natural settings, audio and video recording, conversation analysis,ethnographic analysis, controlled experimental behavioral testing, and physiological recording.For her dissertation research, Sonya Pritzker is currently carrying out fieldwork in a LosAngeles area school of Oriental Medicine looking at language socialization and ideologies oftranslation in U.S. Chinese medical education. She is therefore sitting in on first year classes inthe program and video-recording the processes by which students (and teachers) socialize andare socialized into the translated language of Chinese medicine. The broader project ties the LosAngeles findings into the divergent practices of translation that inform the creation ofeducational texts, and so she is also traveling around the U.S., China, and Taiwan interviewingrelevant translators. The overall goal of this work is to bring together theory in linguistic andmedical anthropology to reveal how translation is enacted as a set of practices and processesthat relate to social, economic, political, and deeply felt personal understandings of language,embodiment, and healing.Anthropology graduate student Mara Bunchbinder has just begun a new project with ProfessorJohn Heritage and Stefan Timmermans in the Sociology Department at UCLA on newborngenetic screening in a clinic at UCLA. They are trying to understand how parents make senseof the sometimes ambiguous positive results, and how they manage uncertainty. The study willconsist of analysis of Videotaped doctor-parent interactions, as well as periodic interviews withparents over the course of one to two years. The research will have important policyimplications since the social impact of California's mandatory at-birth genetic screening islargely unknown.As part of her dissertation research, Heather Willihnganz has been documenting a two-yearMaster of Social Work program in Los Angeles. She followed an entire cohort of 88 students asthey learned about the city of LA, its history, its social welfare laws, policies and programs, andthe needs of LA residents - particularly those seen as "vulnerable," e.g. the poor, the sick, theelderly, kids in gangs. She visited students in a wide variety of social service agencies in LosAngeles, including those specializing in mental health services, public welfare services forneglected and abused children, the Department of Veterans Affairs, a middle school whereracial conflict was a central issue, and a program for torture victims seeking asylum. She alsowent on lengthy tours with the social work students of homeless shelters on Skid Row, and theMedical Services Building of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown LA - thelargest mental institution in the United States.51