About

Theodore K. Gideonse, PhD, MFA, is an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Health, Society & Behavior and serves as the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at the UC Irvine Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health. His academic work centers on medical anthropology, health discourses, and public health pedagogy. Professor Gideonse has contributed to the field through various scholarly outputs, including publications such as "Pride, Shame, and the Trouble with Trying to Be Normal" (Ethos, 2015) and "Unapologetically Inaccurate" (Anthropology News, 2019), as well as presentations like "Cognitive Dissonance & My Friend Michael" at TEDxUCIrvine in 2019. His professional focus integrates anthropological perspectives with public health education, reflecting a commitment to exploring the social dimensions of health and illness.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Sociology
• Nursing
• Art
• Crystallography
• Criminology
• Chemistry
• Cognitive science
• Business
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• CURED Written and Directed by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer Story Center Films and Singer & Deschamps Productions, 2020 80 Minutes

  Culture Medicine and Psychiatry · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Cognitive science
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Managers' and Leaders’ Perceptions of Sexual and Gender-Based Public Harassment in the Veterans Health Administration

  Women s Health Issues · 2022 · 4 citations

  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Social psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Correction to: Cured Written and Directed by Patrick Sammon and Bennett Singer Story Center Films and Singer & Deschamps Productions, 2020

  Culture Medicine and Psychiatry · 2022-03-01

  erratumOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Challenges to Engaging Women Veterans in Quality Improvement From Patient Care to Policy: Women's Health Managers' Perspectives

  Women s Health Issues · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Nursing

  INTRODUCTION: Patients are uniquely positioned to identify issues and to provide innovative solutions to problems impacting their care. Yet, patient engagement in quality improvement (QI) and health care governance remains limited and underexplored. In the Veterans Health Administration, the work of women's health managers (WHMs) includes engaging women veterans, a numerical minority with unique health care needs, in QI. We aimed to understand the extent to which WHMs engage women veterans along a continuum, highlight challenges to engagement, and identify potential strategies to facilitate multilevel patient engagement. METHODS: Data were generated from a multisite evaluation to improve delivery of comprehensive women's health care in Veterans Health Administration primary care sites. We conducted 39 semistructured interviews with WHMs across 21 sites. Guided by Carman et al.'s patient engagement framework, we analyzed the interviews using rapid-qualitative and content analysis methods. RESULTS: When effectively engaged, women veterans were important champions and partners in QI activities to improve the structure and delivery of care. However, most WHMs engaged women veterans in mainly informal or passive ways-that is, solicited feedback through comment cards, surveys, focus groups, and townhall meetings-and did not report pursuing more in-depth or long-term forms of engagement. WHMs also identified a variety of facilitators and challenges to engaging women veterans in QI. CONCLUSIONS: There may be unanticipated benefits to health care policy from engaging patients in QI, especially for patients with unique health care needs who represent a minority within the health care system. However, managers require training and workflow integration of patient engagement tasks to increase their efficiency and allow for meaningful patient engagement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Captain Marvel Smirks All the Way to the Bank

  Anthropology News · 2019-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unapologetically Inaccurate

  Anthropology News · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Cultural Universals in <i>Avengers: Endgame</i>

  Anthropology News · 2019-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• An examination of consensual sex in a men’s jail

  International Journal of Prisoner Health · 2018-01-10 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use secondary data from qualitative interviews that examined the sexual behaviors, HIV attitudes, and condom use of 17 gay, bisexual, and transgender women housed in a protective custody unit in the Los Angeles County Jail (Harawa et al., 2010), to develop a better understanding of the consensual sexual behaviors of male prisoners. Design/methodology/approach Study eligibility included: report anal or oral sex with another male in the prior six months; speak and understand English; and incarcerated in the unit for at least two weeks. Data analysis consisted of an inductive, qualitative approach. Findings Findings illuminate participants' experiences concerning how the correctional facility shaped their sexual choices and behaviors, and the HIV-risk reduction strategies they employed. Originality/value This study contributes to the prison-sex literature, and is timely, given current federal and local HIV/AIDS priorities. Recommendations that address male prisoners' sexual and health needs and risks are posed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Methamphetamine Addiction, Hiv Infection, And Gay Men

  2017-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2016-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Nurse G, as I'll call her, is one of the nurses at the jail where I am conducting fieldwork.Even when inmates are difficult -whether from mental illness, drug addiction, or a just generally malevolent temperament -Nurse G is remarkably calm and kind.One way that she is able to keep her wits, she told me, is by never reading the arrest records of the inmates.Twenty years ago, she had spent a good deal of emotional energy on one inmate, a sweet man who was sick with AIDS.Then one day she read his file.He was a pedophile.She was horrified that she had developed a strong empathic relationship with such a man, a monster."I have children," she stated simply.In order to do her job, she said, she realized that she couldn't know anything about what the inmates have done.Some of their crimes are so awful, caring for the criminal would be impossible.It's easier to care for the seemingly blank slate.In modern Western culture, sex offenders, and particularly pedophiles, are both irredeemable and radioactive.Even after serving time for their crimes, sex offenders must register with the state, their addresses and criminal histories always easily available on the Internet so that the general public can know how to avoid them and pressure them to move far away.Even though sex offenders are much less likely to repeat their crimes, it is assumed that they will always do it again.Sex offender registries exist in every state, while registries for murderers and other violent criminals only exist in a handful of places (though the number is increasing).Empathy for sex offenders is not only unheard of, it's not allowed.They have been described as the lepers of postmodernity, untouchable and totally shunned.But while Jesus cared for the lepers and asked his followers to do the same, virtually no one is asking for pedophiles to be treated as worthy of such care.Instead, they have become our culture's ultimate bogey man, the result, Roger Lancaster argues, of a cascade of panics about sex, risk, and victimization over the last 50 years, panics to which we are now addicted (2011, 14).Anthropologists, drawn to the marginalized and stigmatized, have studied prostitutes, gangsters, undocumented migrants, drug dealers, people with schizophrenia, heroin addicts, the homeless, child soldiers and those who have killed for violent dictators -classically, the "strange" who we can make familiar.But anthropologists, with very few exceptions, have resisted looking for common ground with men who have molested five-year-old girls, with serial rapists of prostitutes, with fathers who have had sex with their teen-aged daughters.Maybe they couldn't imagine any common ground; maybe they couldn't stomach their research subjects.As

  PublisherOA PDF

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth M. Yano

  UCLA Health

  8 shared

• Alison Brown

  Cardiff University

  7 shared

• Tana M. Luger

  Center for the Study of Healthcare Provider Behavior

  6 shared

• Karen E. Dyer

  5 shared

• Anneka Oishi

  VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System

  5 shared

• Tanya T. Olmos‐Ochoa

  5 shared

• Ismelda Canelo

  Center for the Study of Healthcare Provider Behavior

  5 shared

• Shay Cannedy

  3 shared

Labs

• Developing Brain LaboratoryPI

Education

• PhD, Anthropology

  University of California, San Diego

  2013

• MFA, Creative Writing

  New School University

  2005

• BA, Social Anthropology

  Harvard University

  1996