Research Areas

Qualitative methods, sociology of health and illness, science and technology studies.

Tamara Schwertel studied Sociology, Political Science and Philosophy in Frankfurt, Paris and Lyon. Currently she is a PhD-candidate at the DFG research training group “Life Sciences – Life Writing: Boundary Experiences of Human Life between Biomedical Explanation and Lived Experience” at the Institute for History, Theory, and Ethics of Medicine in Mainz, Germany. Her PhD project applies situational analysis to study Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) therapy for movement and psychiatric disorders in order to understand how it was possible to establish the technology as a legitimate procedure.Here, a key aspect is the effect of DBS on the relation between patient and disease, which is analyzed on
the historical, collective and individual level.She has been a lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt, Gutenberg University Mainz, University of Siegen and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After finishing her master’s degree, she was a research assistant at the University of Siegen and a member of the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation”.Her research interests and publications focus on situational analysis, (feminist) STS and sociology of
health and illness. Her most recent article is “Qualitative Health Research, Science and Technology Studies, and Situational Analysis. Insights from Deep Brain Stimulation Research” in collaboration with U. Offenberger (Journal of Qualitative Research). Currently, she is also coediting the anthology
“Situational Analysis as a Research Program” (Springer) and she is coediting a special issue at the Forum Qualitative Social Research (FQS) about “Social Worlds, Arenas and Situational Analysis Theoretical Debates and Empirical Research Experiences”. At the moment she is co-organizing a panel about feminist
STS perspectives on the circulations of knowledges in (digital) medical applications at the STS-Hub at Human Technology Center Aachen, Germany 2023.