Mara Buchbinder

Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program
University of California, Los Angeles


My research in medical and linguistic anthropology is motivated by a strong interest in the relationship between chronic illness and family dynamics. By examining how illness experience is articulated and organized in family interactions, I consider chronic illness to be a fundamentally social, cultural, and interactional phenomenon with profound implications for family functioning and family relationships. To date, most discourse analytic studies of health communication focus only on institutional talk between doctors and patients. Little research has been devoted to discerning how illness and health are discussed and understood informally, by patients and their families in their everyday lives. By using video to document the ethnographic context of face-to-face talk across both institutional and informal contexts, my research will consider the interactional and sociocultural processes by which illness becomes instantiated in everyday family activities.

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