Assistant Professor
she/her
Jane Pryma is a sociologist of health and medicine who explores how politics, medical technologies, and human rights shape what we know about pain and disability. Her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, and Contemporary Sociology.
Pryma’s book manuscript, Pain (Mis)Management: The Rise and Fall of a Right to Pain Relief argues that analyses of the opioid crisis focused only on pharmaceutical companies overlook the political economic conditions that encouraged politicians, pain specialists, the healthcare industry, and chronic pain sufferers to produce opioid-centric pain science and policies. Comparing French and U.S. pain management, she shows how networks of pain expertise, in two different healthcare and welfare systems, institutionalized a “right to pain relief,” shaping pain management practices, rates of prescription opioid use, and the credibility of pain science in each country.
Mobilizing theories of intersectionality and boundary-work, her research has examined how gender, racial, and class inequalities affect how people prove that they deserve medical care and disability rights. She is currently developing the concept of “slow rights” to reveal how speed and standardization affect the implementation of new rights claims. Her next book project considers the relationship between trauma, disability, and inequality, analyzing how organizations evaluate and provide reasonable accommodations for people disabled by psychosocial trauma.
Pryma received her B.A. in Sociology and English from Kenyon College and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her work has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including a fellowship at Sciences Po-Paris and grants from the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, the Paris Program in Critical Theory, and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University.