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Panel: Health Equity in Anti-Immigrant Times–Impacts and Responses in Key Destinations and Critical Occupations

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I participated in an engaging double panel titled, “Health Equity in Anti-Immigrant Times: Impacts and Responses in Key Destinations and Critical Occupations” sponsored by the Society for Medical Anthropology at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My talk was in the first panel on Wednesday, March 19, 2014. It was my first time to the Southwest, and it was a trip worth taking. The landscape and art were so different from anything else I had seen. I took a day trip to Sante Fe as well.

Talk: Im/migrant Health during Anti-Immigrant Times – Using Ethnography to Document Experiences of Mobile Populations in the US Southeast

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I gave a brown-bag talk on Monday, February 24, 2014 at Center for the History of the New America at the University of Maryland. This talk discussed using traditional and rapid ethnographic methods to document the complex relations between unauthorized migrant labor, mobility, and structural and social vulnerability, in particular, the experiences of im/migrant populations in HIV/AIDS public health prevention efforts. Using ethnographic research conducted with health and social service providers working with Latino migrant workers and sex workers in rural North Carolina and with Haitians and HIV/AIDS experts Miami, the talk will highlight the diversity of im/migrant experiences in HIV/AIDS prevention and document the health needs of mobile populations more broadly. Findings will be used to discuss practical implications for HIV/STD prevention, including calling on public health institutions and practitioners to incorporate the concept of mobility as an organizing principle for delivery of health services.

Talk: Im/migrant Health during Anti-Immigrant Times–Using Ethnography to Document Experiences of Mobile Populations in the US Southeast

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I gave a brown-bag talk on Monday, February 24, 2014 at Center for the History of the New America at the University of Maryland. This talk discussed using traditional and rapid ethnographic methods to document the complex relations between unauthorized migrant labor, mobility, and structural and social vulnerability, in particular, the experiences of im/migrant populations in HIV/AIDS public health prevention efforts. Using ethnographic research conducted with health and social service providers working with Latino migrant workers and sex workers in rural North Carolina and with Haitians and HIV/AIDS experts Miami, the talk will highlight the diversity of im/migrant experiences in HIV/AIDS prevention and document the health needs of mobile populations more broadly. Findings will be used to discuss practical implications for HIV/STD prevention, including calling on public health institutions and practitioners to incorporate the concept of mobility as an organizing principle for delivery of health services.

Panel: Advancing Health Through A Racial Lens

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I participated in an amazing panel with notable female scholars on the topic of race and health. The panel was held at the University of Maryland on Thursday, February 20, 2014 and featured Professor Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. My talk was titled “Treating Difference: Race, Risk, and the Politics of HIV/AIDS Prevention.” I spoke about investigating issues of race and risk in HIV/AIDS prevention using theoretical and methodological approaches from medical anthropology and science and technology studies.

Talk: Treating Culture – The Making of HIV/AIDS Experts and Communities

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This talk is my first speaking engagement at the University of Maryland about “Treating AIDS.” It is part of the Maryland Population Research Center’s Fall 2013 Seminar Series held on Monday, November 11, 2013.

Taken from a chapter from “Treating AIDS,” this talk explores how HIV / AIDS prevention experts have become increasingly focused on communities and their cultures as the site of risk and, consequently, targeted interventions. In response to calls to promote health equity by addressing social and structural determinants of health, HIV/AIDS prevention science is continually shifting its priorities from individual-level interventions to those that target communities. This has necessitated a change in how risk is conceptualized, moving from predominantly biological (race, age, and gender) and behavioral (heterosexual and homosexual) categories of risk, to discourses of culture as inherently related to risk. Using ethnographic evidence from long-term engaged fieldwork, I demonstrate that this shift in practice has diluted notions of community, conflated behavioral and biological traits with culture, and reformulated the concepts of culture and community as essentialized and fixed entities. This has the effect of naturalizing the categorization of people by behavioral risk and, in turn, linking particular diseases to social categories of people. This move in HIV/AIDS prevention toward a community-level focus also overlooks the complex ways in which Haitians conceptualize community as a site of both disengagement and belonging.

Talk: Treating Culture–The Making of HIV/AIDS Experts and Communities

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This talk is my first speaking engagement at the University of Maryland about “Treating AIDS.” It is part of the Maryland Population Research Center’s Fall 2013 Seminar Series held on Monday, November 11, 2013.

Taken from a chapter from “Treating AIDS,” this talk explores how HIV / AIDS prevention experts have become increasingly focused on communities and their cultures as the site of risk and, consequently, targeted interventions. In response to calls to promote health equity by addressing social and structural determinants of health, HIV/AIDS prevention science is continually shifting its priorities from individual-level interventions to those that target communities. This has necessitated a change in how risk is conceptualized, moving from predominantly biological (race, age, and gender) and behavioral (heterosexual and homosexual) categories of risk, to discourses of culture as inherently related to risk. Using ethnographic evidence from long-term engaged fieldwork, I demonstrate that this shift in practice has diluted notions of community, conflated behavioral and biological traits with culture, and reformulated the concepts of culture and community as essentialized and fixed entities. This has the effect of naturalizing the categorization of people by behavioral risk and, in turn, linking particular diseases to social categories of people. This move in HIV/AIDS prevention toward a community-level focus also overlooks the complex ways in which Haitians conceptualize community as a site of both disengagement and belonging.