About me.
I am an Assistant Professor of Maternal and Child Health at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. I am a medical anthropologist and ethnographic photographer by training. My research and teaching interests are broadly related to reproductive justice and health equity, gender and kinship, masculinities studies, political economy of health, critical global and public health, and ethnographic research design, methods, and ethics.
Current work: The Entourage Lab
Dissertation Research (2014-2020)
My doctoral project, funded by the NSF-GRFP and Fulbright-Hays DDRA, is an ethnography of the prenatal care roles of working-class men in Dakar, Senegal. Global health rhetoric about men as obstacles to women’s health have been used to justify a focus on initiatives to encourage their involvement in prenatal care and childrearing in novel but counter-productive ways. Building on the concept of absent-presence, my dissertation demonstrates that in these globalizing discourses and in Dakarois households, expectant fathers play simultaneously compelling and understudied roles in pregnancy, labor, and delivery. My approach brings men back into the analysis as gendered agents, opening new directions for an empirical study of pregnancy and birth outcomes in social and political-economic contexts.
I found that while men in Dakar are not actively engaged in Western notions of prenatal care, they are part of a local system of social support and play indispensable roles supporting pregnant women financially and emotionally. Further, the fulfillment of those roles is caught in tension between prescriptions of global health discourse “from above” and socio-economic realities of men’s lived experiences. My findings make a critical intervention into conversations about men and masculinities at the intersections of healthcare and the state. Additionally, the applied component of my work compels stakeholders at the state and local levels and the broader global health community to rethink strategies of increasing men’s involvement and decreasing rates of maternal and infant mortality.
To complete this research, I spent five summers followed by 12 consecutive months in Dakar conducting participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, a slew of cognitive methods, and visual ethnography in collaboration with two research assistants, over 40 expectant couples, and dozens of professionals in healthcare, state bureaucracy, and development. All research was conducted in French or Wolof.
Curriculum Vitae.
PDF (Revised 10/31/2024)