SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING

Theoretical Traditions

I engage in traditional scholarship, public and multimodal scholarship, as well as and scholar-advocacy with my research collaborators. This blend of traditional, intimate, and political work is foundational to my methods as an ethnographer and to the scholar-advocate relationships I have forged throughout my career. Through longterm engagement with a court-mandated, Medicaid-funded drug treatment network in Philadelphia, my research agenda centers the relationship between community-based nonprofit healthcare and mass incarceration in the context of racialized urban inequality. I join the medical anthropology tradition that engages the relationship between clinical technologies and historical inequality, with the political and economic anthropology of the state, law, and development to understand the streets as a political sphere of historical inequality rather than its marginalized location. My training in Public Health, Bioethics, and ethnographic research in carceral institutions have also led to conceptual and practical insights in the traditions of public health, social legal studies, and the anthropology of moral and ethical life.

Teaching

I take an ethnographic approach to teaching. In other words, I structure my courses as an exploratory experience for students; I aim for them to cultivate their own understandings of the material through active engagement and critical self-reflection. This experience, like ethnography, is iterative, and so I expect the course to evolve as the experiences of the students – or their interests and comprehension levels – evolve in tandem. Each course is grounded in anthropological methods and modes of knowledge-building. For this reason, my course curricula will be structured in parallel with the development of community-based sites of learning, research, and advocacy. I’ve learned firsthand that building ethical and advocacy-oriented relationships across gradients of power is hard emotional and intellectual work that requires constant reflexivity. Forging a structure and language for that reflexivity, especially one that students can take with them into the field and their future, shapes both my teaching and course curriculum development. I enjoy helping students not only to grow as thinkers and practitioners of social science, but also to develop as people who can engage in relationships across axes of difference.

I have taught advanced and introductory undergrad level anthropology courses at both Johns Hopkins and the University of Pennsylvania, and I have taught a doctoral level Anthropology course to Public Health students as well. The topics of the courses I have taught are as follows: Addiction: A Medical Anthropological Approach to Addiction; Governing Health: Care, Inequality, and the State; Medical Anthropology; Global Pharmaceuticals; and Global Health. Currently, I am teaching introductory courses to Public and Global Health and a more advanced class on Public Health and Anthropology.

My position as festival director and co-director of the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts at Penn (CAMRA) helped me channel my approach to pedagogy through diverse media. As a collective, we sought to advance alternative research in non-textual modalities, bringing scholars and students together over films, photography, podcasts, and other media. As a professor, I am committed to instilling in students the capacity to ask their own ethnographic questions through a variety of media.