I am an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at Texas State University. Prior to my time at Texas State, I was an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Program in Public Health at the University of Rochester, a postdoctoral fellow at John Hopkins University, and received my PhD in Medical Anthropology with certificates in Urban and Africana studies from The University of Pennsylvania, and a MPH in Global Health and Health Behavior and Health Equity from The University of Michigan.

Through long-term ethnographic and public health engagement with a court-mandated drug treatment network in Philadelphia, my ongoing research explores the structures that connect community-based health services, mass incarceration, and street-based poverty in the United States. I chart the entanglements of public health and criminal law that govern racialized U.S. urban inequality in a global frame, engaging “the streets” as the central political sphere of this inequality rather than its marginalized location. Spanning the fields of Anthropology, Public Health, and Legal and Africana Studies, my work attends to the everyday experiences of giving and receiving health services in contexts of substance use, incarceration, and community reentry from jail/prison.

My first book project, The Treatment Game: The Street, The State, and the Global Politics of Recovery, is a story about the relationship between the streets and clinical recovery in nonprofit drug treatment in Philadelphia. The book argues that the process of recovering from drug and alcohol addiction requires the diagnosis and anchoring of problems in the past to chart a vision for the future. Based on three years of ethnographic research in a network of court-mandated, Medicaid-funded, and Black-owned drug treatment providers, the book is grounded in three interrelated political transformations of the late 1990s: the privatization of healthcare; the rise of mass incarceration; and the proliferation of street-based labor markets due to widening inequality. My research shows how the state relied upon the nonprofit, Medicaid-funded healthcare market alongside the courts and the jails to govern the streets through drug treatment care. City government recruited upwardly mobile Black and Brown entrepreneurs who had “recovered” from street-based life to care for their own communities by opening healthcare centers. The Treatment Game argues that in this context, the clinical concept of recovery depoliticizes the historical material conditions of the streets – urban informality – to have three, primary effects: first, it constructs a local biology of addiction from the material conditions of urban informality, and in doing so, makes and remakes race in the context of the U.S. city. Second, the book argues that the clinical concept of recovery obfuscates the political and economic entanglements that render the streets structurally integral to – and continuous with – the functioning of Philadelphia’s public health and welfare state. Once state-funded nonprofit healthcare markets are placed in relationship to the streets that they treat, we see that nonprofit healthcare markets operate in dynamic relationship to street-based markets – or, as they are referred to in this context: “games.” It is at the intersection of the streets and nonprofit healthcare where the treatment game is born. And third, the book argues that though clinical recovery presents drug treatment as a contrast to carceral techniques of incarceration and racialization, it actually operates alongside and in conjunction with these techniques rather than as a progressive alternative to them. The clinical concept of recovery meets and blurs with the political concept of progress, materially anchoring racialized communities to a problematic past from which they must recover to progress into the future.

I conducted this research in collaboration with various city agencies, participating in applied projects in the field of public health. I am presently conducting further technical and scientific research in collaboration with faculty at the University of Rochester, Johns Hopkins, and Jefferson University in the fields of addiction medicine, law and public health, and prisoner health. I am passionate about integrating students into both my ethnographic and public health research, rendering service to and collaboration with the surrounding city and county a fundamental part of my intellectual, pedagogical, and mentorship process.

I am deeply passionate about racialized urban inequality and health disparities: theoretically investigating the forces that have produced and maintained them, as well as the applied interventions that can help mitigate their effects. Specifically, I am committed to researching and understanding the institutional networks that govern racialized urban inequality, those of the public health and carceral state.