Faculty/Staff Directory

• Applied biocultural, medical anthropology
• Decolonizing anthropology
• Syndemic Theory
• Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America
• Maternal and infant health with an emphasis on timing of delivery
• Developmental origins of health and disease and stress during the childbearing year
• Alternative models of maternity/reproductive health care
• Birth workers (doulas and midwives) and their capacity for improving health outcomes for the under/unjustly-served
• Social justice and community engaged research (CEnR)
• Health Systems Reform

My overarching area of interest is culture, the body, and health. Said in another way, my primary research interest (currently) is the body as the subject andobject of culture, and the bearing that subject/object duality has on how health is understood, experienced, assessed, etc.

My current pursuits with respect to that overarching interest fall into three categories:

• physicality and identity
• intersectionality
• physical activity and wellbeing

My current projects  and their category alignment:

• Utility of  robust norms assessment for increasing the predictive capacity of health behavior theories (physicality and wellbeing)
• Effect of the psychosocial benefits of physical activity on girls’ school performance (physicality and wellbeing)
• Collage construction as a method for exploring physicality and identity (physicality and identity)
• The role of race/gender as a key intersection in African American adolescent girls’ physicality (intersectionality)
• History as a social determinant of health (this really goes back to my overarching question).

My population focus is African American women and girls.