Welcome
I am an anthropologist at Arizona State University, with expertise in human biology, demography, and ethnography. I design collaborative projects, train teams, and lead transdisciplinary social science research projects that can unravel and help solve complex health and environmental challenges.
Our New Book
"Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health" has been released. The book reveals how much of the global health work we do unwittingly create highly damaging social stigmas. Amber and I also have some ideas about how to fix it.
Click here to read the review in Nature
"This is a magnificent, highly engaging, and ethnographically informed examination of the fateful intersection of stigma and public health." Merrill Singer, University of Connecticut.
"Filled at every level with grounded examples that contradict perceived wisdom, the book is a model of critical thinking." Thomas Leatherman, U Mass.
"The approach here is highly original and important." Peter Brown, Emory.
"Interesting, timely, and lucid." Andrea Wiley, Indiana U.
"[T]wo eminent scholars of stigma have provided a deeply engaging road map" Alexander Tsai, Harvard Medical School.
"Combining global reach with insightful depth.... this eye-opening warning offers a novel blueprint for improving population health." Bernice Pescosolido, Indiana U.
"[A]n impeccably researched, collaborative, thought-provoking, and boundary-breaking book that should be required reading for anyone interested in public health, medicine, and anthropology. It stands as an exemplar for public scholarship." Emily Mendenhall, Georgetown University.
Here's a commentary with some of the arguments in short form
New Stigma Training
We have recently developed a stigma awareness/reduction training for CHES credit that is offered free through the Western Public Health Training Center.
Our New Blog
We have a new blog at Psychology Today called Diagnosis: Human. We use insights from anthropology to understand what hurts and heals us humans.
New Podcasts
Period Podcast. Illness, stigma, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Psych Central. How stigma is everywhere.
The Sausage of Science. Water pirates, stigma and other stuff.
Water and Society - a new book series
We are editing a new book series in partnership with Johns Hopkins University Press. We are looking for insightful social science about how water - or lack of it - shapes and reflects our lives and societies.
Household Water Insecurity Experiences Research Network (HWISE-RCN)
I am proud to be on the steering committee of the HWISE research collaborative network, funded by the National Science Foundation. The effort brings together scholars and practitioners from all around the world to better document the lived experience of water insecurity.
The homepage header is a painting by Odra Noel, courtesy of Wellcome Collections. It shows the tissue of the major diseases in different world regions