about ME

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Program in Public Health at the University of Rochester, and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to my time at Johns Hopkins, I received my PhD in Anthropology with certificates in urban and africana studies from The University of Pennsylvania.

Through long-term ethnographic engagement with a court-mandated drug treatment network in Philadelphia, my ongoing research explores the political and social 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 addiction, incarceration, and community reentry from jail/prison.

My first book project, The Treatment Game: The Street, The State, and the Global Politics of Recovery, renders recovery a political project of urban development rather than only a clinical project of healing in community-based drug treatment. 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 reveals the clinical process of recovery as one that transforms street-based historical inequality into a racialized and individualized problem of behavior, grounding the process not only in bodily and spiritual healing, but in the political and economic development of Black and Brown populations. Examining the connections between the “streets”, upwardly mobile community leaders, and the privatized state, my work reveals how the contemporary problematization of poverty is informed by historical processes of racialization. Aligning the clinical process of recovery in the U.S. Rustbelt city with the ongoing project of global development, drug treatment center actors ally with and contest state visions for urban progress.

I conducted this research in collaboration with various city agencies, participating in applied projects both technically and advocacy based in the field of public health. I am presently conducting further technical and scientific research in collaboration with faculty at Johns Hopkins in the fields of addiction science and prisoner health. I bring this public health experience to a reparations project, analyzing research on the historical violence Johns Hopkins has inflicted on Black Baltimore to draft reparative policy recommendations for the university as a part of my postdoctoral fellowship. Engaging in community- and university-based advocacy and applied research, my research and teaching are grounded in the fight for social justice.

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 aimed at addiction treatment and criminal correction in particular.