Maren Klawiter, a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology will be working this year on a dissertation entitled Reshaping the Contours of Breast Cancer: From Private Stigma to Public Actions. The project proposes to examine recent transformations in the social contexts, cultural codes, and collective practices through which breast cancer is constituted as both a discursive object and an illness experience. Three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Bay Area women’s cancer community, supplemented by interviews, analysis of social movements texts, and historical research, support the dissertation’s aim of identifying, disentangling, and analyzing different “cultures in action.”