ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2013
The good-enough science-and-politics of anthropological collaboration with evidence-based clinical research: Four ethnographic case studies.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Tranq burn: Exploring the etiology of xylazine-related soft tissue injuries.The International journal on drug policy · 2025Article
- Independence with others: Lessons for anthropology from postdocs in team science.Human organization · 2024Article
- Rethinking urban-rural designations in public health surveillance of the overdose crisis and crafting an agenda for future monitoring.The International journal on drug policy · 2023Article
- The culture of experimentation in epidemiology-50 years later.International journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Ethnography, Tactical Responsivity and Political Utility.Journal of contemporary ethnography · 2022Article
- Deported, homeless, and into the canal: Environmental structural violence in the binational Tijuana River.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2022Article
- Leveraging anthropological expertise to respond to the COVID-19 global mental health syndemic.American anthropologist · 2022Article
- The introduction of fentanyl on the US-Mexico border: An ethnographic account triangulated with drug checking data from Tijuana.The International journal on drug policy · 2022Article
- Xylazine spreads across the US: A growing component of the increasingly synthetic and polysubstance overdose crisis.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2022Article
- Methodological approaches for the prediction of opioid use-related epidemics in the United States: a narrative review and cross-disciplinary call to action.Translational research : the journal of laboratory and clinical medicine · 2021Review
- How Do You Build a "Culture of Health"? A Critical Analysis of Challenges and Opportunities from Medical Anthropology.Population health management · 2020Article
- Explaining the social gradient in smoking and cessation: the peril and promise of social mobility.Sociology of health & illness · 2020Article
- Nicotine addiction as a moral problem: Barriers to e-cigarette use for smoking cessation in two working-class areas in Northern England.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2019Article
- Article
- Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation.Third world quarterly · 2018Article
- When "the Cure" Is the Risk: Understanding How Substance Use Affects HIV and HCV in a Layered Risk Environment in San Juan, Puerto Rico.Health education & behavior : the official publication of the Society for Public Health Education · 2017Article
- Heroin uncertainties: Exploring users' perceptions of fentanyl-adulterated and -substituted 'heroin'.The International journal on drug policy · 2017Article
- Structural Vulnerability: Operationalizing the Concept to Address Health Disparities in Clinical Care.Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The apolitical legitimacy of "evidence-based medicine" offers a practical means for ethnography and critical social-science-and-humanities-of-health theory to transfer survival resources to structurally vulnerable populations and to engage policy and services audiences with urgent political problems imposed on the urban poor in the United States that harm health: most notably, homelessness, hyperincarceration, social service cut-backs and the War on Drugs. We present four examples of collaborations between ethnography and clinical research projects that demonstrate the potentials and limits of promoting institutional reform, political debate and action through distinct strategies of cross-methodological dialog with epidemiological and clinical services research. Ethnographic methods alone, however, are simply a technocratic add-on. They must be informed by critical theory to contribute effectively and transformatively to applied health initiatives. Ironically, technocratic, neoliberal logics of cost-effectiveness can sometimes render radical service and policy reform initiatives institutionally credible, fundable and capable of generating wider political support, even though the rhetoric of economic efficacy is a double-edged sword. To extend the impact of ethnography and interdisciplinary theories of political-economic, cultural and disciplinary power relations into applied clinical and public health research, anthropologists - and their fellow travelers - have to be able to strategically, but respectfully learn to see through the positivist logics of clinical services research as well as epidemiological epistemology in order to help clinicians achieve - and extend - their applied priorities. In retrospect, these four very differently-structured collaborations suggest the potential for "good-enough" humble scientific and political strategies to work for, and with, structurally vulnerable populations in a punitive neoliberal era of rising social inequality, cutbacks of survival services, and hyperincarceration of the poor.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.