Title:  Assistant Professor

Office:  4176C BSB

Phone:  (312) 413-3755

Email:  This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Research Interests:  Social Theory, Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Health, Globalization, Political Sociology, Critical Gender and Race Studies, and Ethnography

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Bio:

Claire Laurier Decoteau earned her PhD from the University of Michigan.  Her dissertation is entitled, “The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa.”  Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in formal and informal settlements on the outskirts of Johannesburg, the project analyzes: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the symbolic struggle over the signification of HIV/AIDS taking place in the public sphere, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms. 

She has also conducted ethnographic research on AIDS activism in the US.  An article emerging from this research, entitled “The Specter of AIDS,” was published in September 2008 in Sociological Theory.  Claire has also participated extensively in organizations dedicated to HIV/AIDS activism and support in the US, Europe and South Africa. 

Overall, her work focuses on the intersection between the social construction of health and peoples’ grounded experience with diseases and the health care system.