I am currently a DFG Postdoctoral researcher in the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin and a member of the Laboratory for the Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations. I completed my PhD in Anthropology (Washington University in St. Louis) and my Masters in Public Health (Columbia University). My research focuses on questions of risk, crisis, and care in psychiatric practice.
My doctoral dissertation examined the implementation of alternative psychiatries in Berlin, specifically the Open Dialogue model for the treatment of psychosis. By studying practitioners, hospital doctors, trainers, insurance providers, and clients, the project reflected on the difficulty of attuning to shared goals in the provision of crisis care, and the ways by which imaginaries of “good care” or “good outcomes” are tethered to divergent social and economic evaluations of time and responsibility.
My postdoctoral work focuses on the discernment of need for individuals living within the category of “psychiatric disability”. The implementation of recent changes to German disability law has positioned these service users in novel relationships with structures and institutions of care. The way everyday needs are recognized – by service users, their family members, their providers, and the state – is taken up as both an object of study and an emergent practice newly shaped by the incorporation of experience-informed (or peer professional) advising.
Publications
2022
Competing responsibilities and the distribution of outcome through dialogic practice Journal Article
In: Medical Anthropology, iss. 42, no. 1, pp. 81-93, 2022.
2021
Ethnografische Theorie ko-laborativ fügen Journal Article
In: Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie (HJK), vol. 13, pp. 522-555, 2021.
Ethnography in health services research: Oscillation between theory and practice Journal Article
In: Qualitative Health Research, 2021.
2020
Sympathetic Care Journal Article
In: Cultural Anthropology , vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 14-22, 2020.
Gestures of Care and Recognition: An Introduction Journal Article
In: Cultural Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 1-5, 2020.
2018
Care Wounds: Precarious Vulnerability and the Potential of Exposure Journal Article
In: Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 628-646, 2018.
2016
Signing on for Dirty Work: Taking Stock of a Public Psychiatry Project from the Inside Journal Article
In: Transcultural Psychiatry, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 506-526, 2016.