Zeynel Gul

ZEYNEL GUL, then a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, was awarded funding in August 2020 to aid research on “Evidence from Chronicity: Law, Expert Knowledge, and the Laboring Body in Turkey,” supervised by Dr. Veena Das. This dissertation ethnographically explores how a state-led expansion of access to medical care for workers in Turkey shapes occupational health litigation in courts. It investigates how the embeddedness of law and governance in the medical field fashions disease ontology and patient experience by producing diagnostic uncertainties. The dissertation examines how claims that workers’ ill health is caused by work conditions are articulated and adjudicated between medicine and law in the context of Turkey’s 2003 Health Transformation Program. It asks why, despite expanded legal rights for workers to claim compensation for occupational diseases, so few cases are decided in their favor. This dissertation argues that under-recognition of occupational diseases stems from divergences between medical and legal understandings of disease causation. Rather than attributing these divergences to the epistemic cultures of medicine and law separately, it shows how different definitions of causation create volatility in diagnostic knowledge across medical, bureaucratic, and legal institutions. Based on ethnographic research in occupational disease hospitals, courts, workplaces, and households, this dissertation moves beyond bedside patient experiences to highlight law’s role in shaping disease ontology. It demonstrates how medical uncertainty, shaped by expert testimonies and bureaucratic reviews, deflects state and employer responsibility, rendering worker suffering agentless and intractable.