Women and Gender Studies Lecture Series: Chronic Crisis

Darling is a sociologist working across the boundaries of the sociology of health, illness and disability, and feminist science studies. She cares about bringing social justice and health inequalities to the center of discussions about the ethics and politics of biomedicine. Her research examines how chronic illness and complex disease are transformed by biomedical science and health policy in the U.S. In her dissertation, she asks what it means for HIV to be defined, managed and experienced as a chronic illness in U.S. healthcare and policy. She ethnographically traces how people living with HIV and their healthcare providers are navigating biomedical bureaucracies, grappling with new insurance markets and attempting to control healthcare costs.

Darling began her training in environmental health sciences at University of California, Berkeley, and the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health. She has collaborated on research projects at University of California, San Francisco, and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Through these collaborations, she has examined concepts of race/ethnicity in gene-environment interaction research, the history of race in genetics after World War II and new frameworks for examining implicated values in biomedical research.