Victor Braitberg

Dr. Braitberg is a cultural anthropologist whose teaching is focused on the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002. Before coming to the Honors College, he worked as a consultant for El Rio Community Health Center and taught anthropology courses for the UA School of Anthropology, Pima Community College, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Braitberg has developed a suite of General Education courses for the Honors College that introduce students to the sociocultural study of science, technology, and medicine grounded in anthropological and historical methods—Cultures of Surveillance, Bodies and Machines, and Exploring Electronic Presence: From the Telegraph to Twitter. With Dr. Joost Van Haren, he co-teaches Knowledge, Power, and Nature, a course that critically examines how our relationship to the natural world is shaped by politics, economics, and culture. He has been involved in the creation of the Health and Human Values (HHV) minor which enables honors students majoring in the health sciences to pursue an interdisciplinary course of study grounded in the theories and methods of the humanities and social sciences. Dr. Braitberg is teaching Introduction to Social Medicine, a course he has developed for the HHV minor examining how social and economic conditions impact health, disease, and the practice of medicine.

Research Interests:  Medical Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, social inequality, governmentalities of health care organization and delivery, imaginaries of information and communication technology, cultures of expertise, politics of knowledge, political economy of rural and indigenous health care, history of science, technology, and medicine, history of cybernetics, social theory.