Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role Socioeconomic and Cultural Variation in Neurotrauma Recovery

Overview: How do individuals who have suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) cope with life after trauma in postneoliberal Argentina? How do ideas of risk predisposition and framings of culpability influence how medical professionals understand and treat patients in public hospitals? How might different expert and lay conceptualizations of the brain and the psyche affect post-injury processes of self-making among such patients? Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), identified by public health officials as a global "silent epidemic," is a disruption in brain function caused by a blow to the head that can produce a range of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial aftereffects. This dissertation research proposes to investigate how Traumatic Brain Injury patients in public hospitals in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area construct their selfhood after injury in relation to circulating ideas about personhood and personal responsibility. By attending to changes in clinical and popular epistemologies about brain and psyche and intersecting political shifts in state governance, this research examines how TBI is apprehended psychologically, bio-medically, and institutionally, shedding light on how patient subjectivity is conceptualized and experienced along lines of risk and socioeconomic status in public sector hospitals. Adopting a critical anthropological perspective to trauma and care, the project will thus illuminate how medical, societal, and familial approaches to injury both interact with and are transformed by individuals' attempts to understand their selfhood after trauma in situations of socio-economic precariousness. Research Objectives and Methods: The objectives of this research will be to: 1) Investigate how medical personnel and institutional framings categorize TBI patients in terms of propensity to risk, culpability, and socioeconomic vulnerability; 2) Understand what ideologies of personhood after TBI are promoted in everyday talk and daily opera