Title: PhD Student
University: Universityof Minnesota
Email: stambler@umn.edu
Website: https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/stambler
Description of your work
My research engages the impacts of technology on health outside biomedical institutions through examination of people’s embodied, lived everyday experiences with their own health while negotiating between contexts of medical and popular health discourse.
Specifically, my current research focuses on how “wellness” is lived. My work traces how the wellness movement in the late 20th and early 21st century United States, alongside the rise of mobile/wearable digital technologies, has contributed significantly to the medicalization of preventive health practices, thus blurring the line between preventive and interventive care and constructing people as “pre-patients.” Further, as wellness programs tend to present themselves as holistic, I argue that they contribute to a blurring of the boundaries between complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and biomedicine. In my dissertation I am examining two cases, one focused on the development of a workplace wellness program and the other focused on a popular commercial diet/wellness program, which serve as key sites of analysis of wellness as it intersects with the use of mobile/wearable digital technologies for self-tracking and self-management. Together, these cases help illuminate the ways that biomedical and popular discourse and technologies work together to shape ideas about health, bodies, and what it means to enact wellness in different spaces.