Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Explanatory Necropolitics: Physicians’ Perspectives On Compliance, Culture, And Competence In The Management Of Chronic Disease, Rithvik Ramesh

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

In this thesis, I explore physicians’ conceptions of culture in the management of chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension. Physicians whom I interviewed deconstructed the challenges of compliance into coded components of knowing, wanting, and doing. This pattern creates a new form of adherent autonomy, which offers the freedom to choose as much as it surveils, expects, and moralizes “good” choices in the pursuit of good care. Consequently, adherent autonomy deprives patients of practical sovereignty and continues to objectify individuals in more indirect and ostensibly acceptable forms. While physicians’ definitions for culture ranged in scope and content, they prominently framed …