Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Ashwak Hauter Social Science

Glocal' Biomedicine: Reformulating Expertise and Epistemology in a Yemen Hospital

In the last 20 years, Yemen experienced a civil war, discontinued aid from the gulf countries, and reforms that cut spending towards health care. Ashwak’s project explores how Yemeni doctors and lay persons view foreign western medicine in comparison to Yemen’s western medicine and how they use communicative practices (Hanks 1996) to explicitly and implicitly co-construct and reproduce these views. This will give insight and space to investigate how medical discourse in Yemen influences consumption and choice of medical practices when faced with the option of local and foreign operated medical institutes. For this project, Ashwak will conduct ethnographic work supplemented by conversational analysis of semi-structured interviews with patients, the accompanying parties, the physicians, the nurses, and the nearby locals at both the Yemen-German and al-Thawrah Hospital in Sanaa, Yemen.

Profile image of Ashwak Hauter
Major: Anthropology/Development Studies
Mentor: Mentor: Professor Stefania Pandolfo
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