Wimberley’s Joe Kotarba has been awarded a prestigious research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his study on aspects of health care in the Big Bend area.
The focus of the study is the practical decisions and activities a wide range of residents and visitors to the Big Bend area make to manage health, illness and injury care.
Senior class students at the Department of Sociology at Texas State University and the Department of Nursing at Sul Ross State University in Alpine collaborated to conduct interviews, overseen by Dr. Minerva Gonzales, Chairperson, and Dr. Veronica Arredondo, Assistant Professor, in the Department of Nursing.
Kotarba’s research in the Alpine and Big Bend area is part of a more comprehensive study of the many ways healers and individuals approach situations where an illness, injury, treatment, prognosis and knowledge are unknown or even mysterious. As a medical sociologist, he has been committed to exploring the social, organizational and cultural processes by which healers of many kinds attempt to control, if not master, the frontiers of health.
Called “The Frontier(s) of Health: The Rural West Texas Study,” the study will continue in the Big Bend, Alpine and Marfa areas through the summer. Kotarba will present a lecture on the study at the European Sociology meetings in Oslo, Norway in June.
Other topics in Dr. Kotarba's comprehensive study include NASA space medicine, professional sports medicine, emergency care in complex public event and concert settings, the medical and political frontiers surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, battlefield medicine, rodeo cowboy injury care, and aging.
Kotarba is also the author of “Music in the Course of Life,” first published in 2022.
