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Camilo Sanz

Camilo Sanz

Assistant Professor

Camilo Sanz.

Office: Dale Hall Tower 512

Email: sanz@ou.edu

Education: Ph.D., University of California-Davis, 2016

Research Interests

  • Medical Anthropology
  • Science and Technology Studies
  • Health care inequalities
  • Assisted-dying
  • Cancer and time
  • Chronic stress and inflammatory biomarkers
  • Epigenetics
  • Insurance businesses
  • Colombia and the Americas

Background


I am an ethnographer of science and medicine. My work explores the relations between disease, capitalism, and socio-economic disparities, specifically in the contexts of Colombia and the United States.

My book Cancer Intersections (forthcoming, UC Press) is an ethnography about inequality in the access to standard oncology treatments under neoliberal conditions. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Cali (2011-2013), this book discusses the deep entanglements between practices (medical, health insurance, judicial, public health policy), which have a common interest like curing or treating cancer, but which must prioritize financial interests. My book shows how social class dictates the rhythm at which patients access standard oncology treatments (chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery), and that even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments ordinarily unfold.

Recently I began developing a collaborative project with scientists at the OU Stephenson Cancer Center. This project will be a bioethnography of chronic psycho-social stress, inflammation, and epigenetic changes in low-income populations in Oklahoma City. A bioethnography is an analytical method that goes beyond merely integrating culture into biology for a more detailed exploration of human health and the body. It aims to merge two distinct methodological approaches - ethnographic observation and biological sampling - into a unified, balanced analysis. This approach perceives the interactions between the environment and the body as consistently relational, dependent on specific circumstances, and as constructed events (Roberts and Sanz 2018).


Recent/Significant Publications

Sanz, C 2024.  Cancer Intersections: Biomedicine, Health insurance, and the Paradoxes of Health Care Reform in Neoliberal Colombia. Oakland: University of California Press

Sanz, C 2021. Ordinary crisis: Cancer care, tutelas and the outsourcing of ethics in neoliberal Colombia, In Boletin de Antropologia 36(61), 93-116. April

Sanz, C 2019. Malignant yet Benign: The Political Economy of a Skin Cancer Diagnosis in Colombia, In Science technology and Human values, 45(1): 112-137

Roberts, F.S Elizabeth and Sanz, Camilo, 2018. Bioethnography: A how-to guide for the twentieth first Centuryā€¯. The Palgrave handbook of Biology and Society. Maurizio Meloni et al (eds). London: Palgrave MacMillan. Pp 749-775

Sanz, C 2017 Out-of-Sync Cancer Care: Health Insurance Companies, Biomedical Practices, and Clinical Time in Colombia, In Medical Anthropology 36(3): 187-201.

Cancer Intersections cover image, a book by Camilo Sanz.
Cancer Intersections cover image, a book by Camilo Sanz.

Classes Taught

  • ANTH 2203- Global Cultural Diversity
  • ANTH 3243- Anthropology of Health

Other Important Information