Areas of Specialization
Biocultural approaches to health and human development; cultural dimensions of psychosocial stress; cardiovascular disease; race and human biological variation; ethnicity and racism; culture theory; social network analysis; research methods; medical anthropology
Current and Recent Projects
With support from the National Science Foundation (Christopher McCarty, co-PI), I am currently working to understand the social and cultural factors that shape poor health among African Americans in Tallahassee, FL. The project, which uses a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, focuses on both structural inequalities and the experience of culturally meaningful social stressors and resistance resources. Read more...
Dark skin color has been linked
to high blood pressure among people of African ancestry in
the U.S., the Carribean, and South America. This pattern has
been interpreted as evidence of both genetic and sociocultural
mechanisms. My research distinguishes between the cultural
and biological dimensions of skin color to test competing
explanations more directly than has been done before.
Researchers across disciplines argue
that race is a cultural construct, not a biological category.
But there is surprisingly little cross-cultural research on
how folk categories like race are culturally constructed.
During a year's fieldwork in Puerto Rico, I used systematic
ethnographic methods to describe the cultural model of color.
My current work extends this focus to the cultural model of
race in the U.S.
As a postdoctoral scholar at the
University of Michigan, I participated in the Healthy Environments
Partnership, a community-based participatory research project
in Detroit. The Partnership aims to understand and address
aspects of the social and physical environments that shape
racial and socioeconomic inequalities in cardiovascular disease.
My experience with this project informs my current collaboration
with colleagues at FSU and elsewhere. Read more...
Recent studies show that upwards
of 80 percent of studies in leading public health and biomedical
journals use race or ethnicity as variables in empirical research.
Student collaborators and
I are conducting a content analysis of leading medical anthropology
journals to describe how medical anthropologists have used
concepts of race, ethnicity, and racism in empirical research.
By comparing trends in medical anthropology, biomedicine,
and public health, we aim to identify areas where debates
across disciplines can inform one another.
In 1910, Franz Boas published the
first results from his classic study, Changes in Bodily
Form of Descendants of Immigrants. This landmark work
became controversial almost immediately, as it challenged
many prevailing ideas about human biology and race. Colleagues
and I are reanalyzing Boas's data to test his conclusions
and to learn about the biological standard of living among
early 20th century immigrants to New York. Read more...
Statement of Research Interests
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