Assistant Professor
she/her
Jane Pryma is a sociologist of health and medicine who explores how political economic systems, medical technologies, and cultural beliefs about rights shape how we understand pain, disability, and our obligation to care for one another. Her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, and Contemporary Sociology.
Pryma’s forthcoming book, Pain Points: Opioids and the Right to Pain Relief in France and the United States (Stanford University Press, 2027) shows how networks of pain expertise, in two different healthcare and welfare systems, institutionalized a “right to pain relief,” affecting 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.
In addition to teaching courses in the sociology of health and medicine and sociological theory at BU, Professor Pryma is Associate Director of the Global Health Politics Workshop, housed at and sponsored by the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
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.