E J Sobo

Dados Biográficos

ID1317
NOMEE J Sobo
PRENOMESE J
SOBRENOMESobo
ASSINATURASOBO E J
AFILIAÇÕESSan Diego State University
ORCID0000-0002-7711-9873
VERIFICADOSim
TOTAL DE OBRAS90
TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES392
TOTAL COMO AUTOR90
TOTAL COMO EDITOR0
PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO1993
ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO2025
ÍNDICE H12

  • Gender and the Algorithmic Future

    Open AccessSammi Mrowka, Amanda K Beardsley et al.ARTICLEAnthropological Forum2025Referências: 25

  • Cheating or Competing? University Students’ Experience of AI Marketing and What It Means for AI Literacy Programming

    Open AccessE J Sobo, David M Goldberg et al.ARTICLEAnnals of Anthropological Practice2025Citada por: 1Referências: 18

    Given generative AI's rapid incursion into higher education, we examined how AI tools are marketed to US college students and how students experience AI promotions. Using a scalable action research model, we collected and analyzed 131 social media ads, 48 student interviews, and field notes compiled by three interns at student‐facing AI companies. Interviewees described AI use as a practical necessity shaped by grading systems, peer norms, and AI…

  • Sound Baths, Trauma Talk, and the Wellness Paradox in the USA

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLEMedical Anthropology2024Citada por: 1Referências: 19

    Yoga-informed sound bath providers orchestrate vibrations from singing bowls, chimes, gongs, and other simple instruments to promote client well-being - sometimes in ways that create a trauma trap. Drawing on immersive research with sound bath providers and receivers in California, USA, I explore how these ritual performances feed on and fuel narratives regarding trauma, stress, and dysregulation, diverting attention from structural and cultural …

  • Adapting rapid ethnographic research in an evolving emergency

    Open AccessE J Sobo, E K Brunson et al.ARTICLEAnnals of Anthropological Practice2024Citada por: 5Referências: 11

    To ensure the real-world utility of emergency ethnographic research, plans must evolve as circumstances shift. The CommuniVax coalition's work provides a case study of this scenario. Using rapid ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and other methods, the six local CommuniVax teams sought to comprehend and improve COVID-19 vaccine access and uptake. To this end, they responded nimbly to varying community priorities, the pandemic's shifting natur…

  • Could ChatGPT Prompt a New Golden Age in Higher Education

    Open AccessE J Sobo, Elisa SoboARTICLETeaching and Learning Anthropology2023

    The public rollout of ChatGPT, a free app that produces uncannily refined responses to users’ questions or prompts, initially had many education professionals up in arms due largely to fears over student cheating. Panic levels receded as a new realization surfaced: rather than simply banning the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI or AI) for assignments, we can and should adapt to chatbot-related challenges, reframing them as opportu…

  • Addressing Covid-19 vaccination equity for Hispanic/Latino communities by attending to aguantarismo

    Open AccessE J Sobo, Griselda Cervantes et al.ARTICLESocial Science & Medicine2022Citada por: 4Referências: 34

    With an eye to health equity and community engagement in the context of the initial COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, the COVID-19-related concerns of the Latinx (Hispanic/Latino) community in southern San Diego (California, USA) were examined using 42 rapid, ethnographically-informed interviews and two focus groups conducted in early-mid 2021. An anthropologically oriented qualitative analysis delimited the cultural standpoint summarized as aguantarism…

  • Cultural conformity and cannabis care in the wake of intractable pediatric epilepsy

    E J SoboARTICLEAnthropology and Medicine2021

    Biomedicine controls seizures for many children with epilepsy - but not all. In such cases, parents struggle in the wake of various structural, cultural, and corporeal ruptures. Continued use of ineffective medications can lead, iatrogenically, to frightening and serious symptoms and debilitations whose effects, along with those of uncontrolled seizures, ripple outward in challenging ways. Using data from 25 Californian (US) parents who favored p…

  • Conspiracy theories in political-economic context

    E J SoboARTICLEJournal for Cultural Research2021

    Profit-boosting manipulation and subterfuge is axiomatic to late-stage US capitalism, even in healthcare. Both groups’ discourses referenced corporations’ self-interested duplicity, such as in sham invitations for patient engagement. Parents also pointed to contemporary measures of good health and citizenship moored to the US political economy’s expectation for independent, self-responsible, ‘productive’ adulthood (ableism). Rejecting normative a…

  • Frederick George Bailey (1924-2020)

    Open AccessE J Sobo, Kevin Avruch et al.ARTICLEAmerican Anthropologist2021Citada por: 1Referências: 14

  • More than a teachable moment

    E J Sobo, Helen Lambert et al.ARTICLEAnthropology and Medicine2020Citada por: 4Referências: 4

    In the aftermath of Mr. George Floyd’s senseless execution on 25 May 2020, in commemoration of and in opposition to countless similar instances of police brutality against unarmed Black Americans, waves of solidarity have pulsed through US streets and now are surging internationally in protests, demonstrations, and vigils. The affirmation that ‘Black Lives Matter’ has likewise been pouring outward in personal as well as official statements. Numer…

  • Medicalization

    Open AccessE J SoboOTHERThe International Encyclopedia of…2018

    Medicalization starts with a definitional process whereby some human experiences gain biomedical relevance and persons with those experiences come under biomedical as opposed to, say, religious or judicial authority. Medicalization thus entails social control; but at the same time it confers entitlements denied to those with nonmedical ailments, including rights to biomedical care as well as a release from full individual culpability for being de…

  • Framing Childhood Vaccination in the United States

    E K Brunson, E J SoboARTICLEHuman Organization2017

    Vaccination rates in some areas of the United States are decreasing. Decreases are slight but significant: the incidence of vaccine preventible disease outbreaks has risen. Vaccination is, once aga

  • Parent use of cannabis for intractable pediatric epilepsy

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLESocial Science & Medicine2017Citada por: 7Referências: 29

  • Culture and Meaning in Health Services Research

    E J SoboBOOKCulture and Meaning in Health…2016

    Culture and Meaning in Health Services Research is a practical guide to applying interpretive qualitative methods to pressing healthcare delivery problems. A leading medical anthropologist who has spent many years working in applied healthcare settings, Sobo combines sophisticated theoretical insights and methodological rigor with authentic, real-world examples and applications. In addition to clearly explaining the nuanced practice of ethnograph…

  • What is herd immunity, and how does it relate to pediatric vaccination uptake? US parent perspectives

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLESocial Science & Medicine2016Citada por: 9Referências: 36

  • Theorizing (Vaccine) Refusal

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLECultural Anthropology2016Citada por: 51Referências: 10

    What goes on when people say no?How can we theorize refusal?In this essay I hope to show the value of casting refusal not only as an instance of resistance, but also as distinct from the latter in important ways (picture a Venn diagram).In doing so, I seek to open up space for a dynamic and salutary reading of refusal and, by extension, of resistance itself.I therefore highlight refusal's productivity-not in terms of achieved regime changes or po…

  • Information Curation among Vaccine Cautious Parents

    E J Sobo, A Huhn et al.ARTICLEMedical Anthropology2016Citada por: 12Referências: 36

    To learn about pediatric vaccine decision-making, we surveyed and interviewed US parents with at least one child kindergarten age or younger (N = 53). Through an anthropologically informed content analysis, we found that fully vaccinating parents (n = 33) mostly saw vaccination as routine. In contrast, selective and nonvaccinating parents (n = 20) exhibited the type of self-informed engagement that the health care system recommends. Selective vac…

  • Anthropological Contributions and Challenges to the Study of Children and Childhoods

    E J Sobo, Elisa SoboARTICLEReviews in Anthropology2015Citada por: 3Referências: 19

    This essay considers the anthropology of childhood's recent growth. It summarizes the sub-field's extensive if often unacknowledged past, reviews its late 20th-century bourgeoning, and then highlights three influential teaching texts, each of which argues for a more considered, culturally informed understanding of children and childhood while performing the vital service of bringing together heretofore scattered ideas and data. To ensure the fiel…

  • Social Cultivation of Vaccine Refusal and Delay among Waldorf (Steiner) School Parents

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLEMedical Anthropology Quarterly2015Citada por: 49Referências: 30

    U.S. media reports suggest that vastly disproportionate numbers of un- and under-vaccinated children attend Waldorf (private alternative) schools. After confirming this statistically, I analyzed qualitative and quantitative vaccination-related data provided by parents from a well-established U.S. Waldorf school. In Europe, Waldorf-related non-vaccination is associated with anthroposophy (a worldview foundational to Waldorf education)-but that was…

  • Salutogenic Education? Movement and Whole Child Health in a Waldorf (Steiner) School

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLEMedical Anthropology Quarterly2015Citada por: 6Referências: 19

    Waldorf education, an independent alternative to public schooling, aims to produce holistically healthy graduates in a formulation that rejects the conventional distinction between education and health. Also striving to bridge that divide, this article characterizes the pedagogically salutogenic techniques Waldorf teachers use in pre-kindergarten (pre-K) and lower grade classes and explicates the ethnomedical understandings underlying them. Waldo…

  • Play's relation to health and well-being in preschool and kindergarten

    E J SoboARTICLEInternational Journal of Play2014Citada por: 3Referências: 17

    In most US pre-k/kindergartens play is justified as serving academic goals. However, Waldorf education, an independent alternative to public schooling, leverages play to promote child health and well-being. This paper examines Waldorf education's approach to play with reference to the underlying cultural model of/for child development that Waldorf teachers subscribe to. It describes how teachers orchestrated play in four pre-k/kindergarten classr…

  • Anthropologists in the Va

    Open AccessE J SoboARTICLEAnnals of Anthropological Practice2013Citada por: 1Referências: 3

    Practicing anthropology within the Veterans Health Administration of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has, until recently, received little serious consideration as a respectable career option for anthropology postgraduates. But times are changing. Anthropologists employed by the VA are responsible for some of the most important and actionable anthropologically informed health research today. Far from being a marginal pursuit, VA anthropolo…

  • Selling medical travel to US patient-consumers

    E J Sobo, Elizabeth Herlihy et al.ARTICLEAnthropology and Medicine2011Citada por: 14Referências: 29

    More US-based patients than ever are travelling abroad for medical or dental services. Beyond financial incentives, what cultural factors have supported this trend? Because of their interest in selling medical travel, medical travel agencies (MTAs) have vested interests in this question. To find out how they are answering it, an ethnographic content analysis of MTA websites was undertaken. Beyond themes promoting a 'worry-free experience' of 'leg…

  • The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine

    E J Sobo, Martha Oehmke LoustaunauBOOKThe Cultural Context of Health,…2010

    A "one size fits all" approach to health care doesn't work well, especially for America's extremely diverse population. This book provides a lively and accessible discussion of how and why a more flexible and culturally sensitive system of health care can and must be achieved. Notable anthropologist George Foster defined the first edition as "a very readable introductory text dealing with the sociocultural aspects of health," adding: "[T]he autho…

  • Anthropologists Research Veteran Health

    Open AccessHeather Schacht Reisinger, E J SoboARTICLEAnthropology News2009