About

I am an anthropologist. Most important to me is understanding how inequities, particularly in health, become naturalized. In other words, how we come to accept that some people are more likely to become sick than others. When health problems become yoked to certain kinds of people, ofter marginalized people, the problem seems to be intractable and solutions even more opaque. My work aims to make plain the simple fact that the radically unequal distribution of wealth that we live with today undermines good faith efforts in clinical medicine and global health to make sustainable change and healthier futures.

As a medical anthropologist, I use ethnographic and collaborative methods to understand how health inequities are reproduced in everyday life. I take this approach to the study of chronic illnesses like diabetes, trying to understand how the nexus of food accessibility, healthcare availability, and community institutions, like churches, shapes the wellness landscape. Essential to my approach is paying critical attention to how racialization operates in shaping how healthcare is practiced and how gender makes a difference in shaping how those health inequities are reproduced.

I have worked with Samoans and in Samoa since 2008, studying Samoan at the University of Hawai’i-Mānoa and the American Samoa Community College. Over this fifteen year period, I have worked in churches, clinics and homes to understand how ideas about diabetes are infused through all spheres of life. In recent years, I have begun to work collaboratively with colleagues at the National University of Samoa and National Health Services.

My original research focused on how people struggled to manage diabetes and related disorders like kidney disease and heart disease in their religious lives. This research found that churches, and in particular Pentecostal churches, provided tools and spaces for making transformative change in ways that could impact health. This is compared to clinical spaces that did not offer meaningful and sustainable paths to creating and sustaining some sense of well-being.

Building on this work, I have recently completed fieldwork on a project that focuses on the connections between diabetic complications and endemic preventive approaches to chronic metabolic disorders. This work has looked at the ways that macro-level approaches to diabetes and obesity in global health have shaped micro-level experiences of living with high levels of glucose across a lifetime. I have studied how health promotion histories and policies influence health outcomes in often contradictory ways. I have also learned from the people and communities most impacted by these macro-level policies, diabetic amputees and their families in Samoa.

Taking this line of inquiry into the space of design, I am currently studying how patients related to technologies that are commonly used for people living with metabolic disorders, like dialysis, insulin pumps, and emergent tech. This includes working with students to conduct fieldwork in a dialysis unit in Rochester, studying students as they learn to make medical technologies and the engineers who design and bring to market technologies for people living with chronic illnesses.

I am currently Honorable Barber B. Conable Jr. Endowed Chair and Director in International and Global Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Previously I worked in the Department of Anthropology at the Pacific University (2014-2019). I completed my BA with in history Fordham University, an MA in Women’s Studies and Anthropology at Brandeis University, and a PhD in Anthropology at Brandeis University.