Claire Laurier Decoteau
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Illinois at Chicago
1007 West Harrison St (MC 312)
Chicago, IL 60607-7140
Email: decoteau@uic.edu
Claire Laurier Decoteau received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan (2008). Broadly, her research focuses on the social construction of health and disease, health inequalities, and peoples’ grounded experiences with healing and health care systems. Decoteau was awarded the 2009 American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Award. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, entitled Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: 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. Decoteau 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. In 2011, Decoteau will be launching a new project focusing on the controversial link between vaccines and autism. For this project, she will be conducting research in the United States on the social construction of risk, health social movements and parental decision-making regarding vaccination.
As an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Decoteau teaches undergraduate and graduate sociological theory as well as courses in the sociology of health and medicine.
Claire's staff page at the University of Illinois at Chicago is available here.
University of Illinois at Chicago
1007 West Harrison St (MC 312)
Chicago, IL 60607-7140
Email: decoteau@uic.edu
Claire Laurier Decoteau received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan (2008). Broadly, her research focuses on the social construction of health and disease, health inequalities, and peoples’ grounded experiences with healing and health care systems. Decoteau was awarded the 2009 American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Award. She is currently working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, entitled Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: 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. Decoteau 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. In 2011, Decoteau will be launching a new project focusing on the controversial link between vaccines and autism. For this project, she will be conducting research in the United States on the social construction of risk, health social movements and parental decision-making regarding vaccination.
As an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Decoteau teaches undergraduate and graduate sociological theory as well as courses in the sociology of health and medicine.
Claire's staff page at the University of Illinois at Chicago is available here.