Cheryl Mattingly, Ph.D.

With a joint appointment in occupational therapy and anthropology, I work at the juncture of two exciting fields. Anthropology as a study of culture focuses on people's everyday lives and what makes those everyday lives meaningful. Occupational therapy as a clinical practice recognizes that the difficulty of pursuing everyday life with clinical conditions and disabilities powerfully influences peoples' experience of their bodies. Occupational therapists ask how conditions and disabilities affect a person's sense of self. That's a salient question among medical anthropologists who have also come to recognize, in their research on disability, how important it is to understand illness and disability as an experience that changes lives, not just as a narrowly understood medical condition. As an anthropologist, a major area of my work has been the study of stories in health care. Interest in narrative has grown tremendously over the past several years in all the health professions, including among physicians. Stories can be especially relevant for occupational therapists because it is often through hearing stories that people learn what it is like for someone to live with disability. And the stories people tell also give many clues about what they care about, what matters most in their lives. This is important because when occupational therapy is most effective, it connects treatment interventions to those areas of deep concern to clients.
A second area of my own work has been the study of how clients, families, and clinicians work together - or run into problems trying to work together - in the practice of rehabilitation. I have been particularly intrigued with how collaboration occurs across large cultural divides, that is when clients and therapists come from very different cultural worlds but must find some kind of common ground in order to work together toward goals.
Finally, I have written extensively about clinical reasoning in occupational therapy, especially the role of narrative in the thinking of occupational therapists, the kinds of stories they tell about their clients and the influence of stories in helping therapists devise treatment approaches tailored to individual clients and their particular needs and strengths.

Biography
Cheryl Mattingly is a cultural and medical anthropologist who has studied professional practices, institutional cultures, and families in urban communities. She received her Ph.D. from MIT and also did a post doctorate at Harvard Medical School. Her interests include ethnography, the study of therapeutic processes, particularly the role of narrative in clinical reasoning, cultural diversity and health care, and the phenomenology of disability. In 2000, she won the Victor Turner Prize for her book Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: the Narrative Structures of Experience, published by Cambridge University Press in 1998. Her essay entitled "In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice" was awarded Best Essay for Medical Anthropology in 1999, receiving the Polgar Prize from the Society For Medical Anthropology. She has received USC's Phi Kappa Phi faculty recognition award and serves on the executive board of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Along with her colleague Mary Lawlor, she has received extensive research grants from the NIH, US Maternal and Child Health, and the US Department of Education. She is co-editor along with Linda Garrow of the well-received collection Narrative and Cultural Contributions of Illness and Healing, published by the University of California Press in 2000.

Selected Publications
Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The narrative Structure of Experience

Clinical Reasoning: Forms of Inquiry in a Therapeutic Practice

Research
Boundary Crossing: A Longitudinal & Ethnographic Study, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Boundary Crossing: Re-situating Cultural Competence, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development