Congratulations to our graduate students on their accomplishments in the 2022-2023 academic year!
Annika Doneghy spent this past academic year as the 2022-2023 Frédéric Bastiat Fellow. The Frédéric Bastiat Fellowship is a “one-year, competitive fellowship program awarded to graduate students attending master’s, juris doctoral programs in a variety of fields including economics, law, political science, and public policy. The aim of this fellowship is to introduce students to the Austrian, Virginia, and Bloomington schools of political economy as academic foundations for contemporary policy analysis, policy-relevant academic research, and other applied topics.” Doneghy spent the past year attending four colloquia, her specific events are focused on health poli-cy.
Regan Gee presented a paper titled “’Food is an emergency every week’: COVID-19 and food access among Cleveland food pantry users” at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in Denver from March 23rd-27th. Gee discussed how while COVID relief programs assisted with food access, many participants continued to be food insecure, creating new and heightened reliance on food pantries. These findings are contextualized by the historical legacy of racist, discriminatory practices such as redlining in Cleveland, which have led to limited food access and community disinvestment. These disparities result in a lack of protective resources to buffer low-income families from the impacts of the pandemic, resulting in exacerbated and prolonged food insecurity.
Daniel Hamilton presented “Biomedicine’s languid approach to gender-affirming care advancements” at the Health Humanities Consortium in March in Cleveland. Hamilton used data collected from ethnographic fieldwork conducted with transgender and gender non-conforming individuals engaged in biomedical gender-affirming care and taking an actor-network-theory approach to explore the ways in which human and non-human actors interact within clinical space to create meaning and communicate shared patient/provider goals. Hamilton’s paper explores the ways in which the tools meant to standardize care, have led to a proliferation of practices to circumnavigate challenges caused by the disconnect between academic and medical research and the social and political lives of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in the United States.
Brooke Jespersen presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference in Cincinnati, OH from March 28—April 1 with her presentation “Who Does Remote Research Include and Exclude?: Lessons Learned from a Remote Ethnography with Older Puerto Rican Adults”. Jespersen’s research looked into how the shift to remote research during the pandemic relied heavily on technology (e.g. zoom; social media-based sample recruitment). Reliance on technology affects who is able to participate in research and who is not. In this presentation, Jespersen shared how she conducted a remote ethnography with older Puerto Rican adults in Cleveland, Ohio during the pandemic. She presented how she adjusted her sampling and data collection methods to include older adults of varying levels of internet access, abilities, and living arrangements. Jespersen reflected on implications for future remote and in-person studies of aging with regard to research participant inclusion and exclusion.
Jillian Schulte presented at the Family & Consumer Sciences 2022 Conference in Columbus, OH on October 20th with her presentation “FM Engage: A Tool to Engage SNAP-Eligible Customers in Healthy Food Shopping”. This presentation explored how farmers’ markets are minimally frequented by SNAP recipients, despite being a known location to purchase fresh, healthy foods at a discounted price through use of SNAP- based nutrition incentive programs. In communities experiencing food apartheid where access to full-service grocery stores is limited, farmers’ markets may be a key resource for accessing fresh and healthy foods. Additionally, on March 29th, 2023, Schulte presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology, Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, OH with her presentation “Healthcare-seeking and COVID-19 within Cleveland’s Bhutanese-Nepali Community”. Schulte’s preliminary study aimed to characterize how Cleveland’s Bhutanese-Nepali refugees navigated healthcare and wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In August-November 2021, remote, semi-structured interviews were conducted with Bhutanese-Nepali patients (N=12) affiliated with a medical organization in Cleveland, Ohio. Thematic analysis uncovered a range of strategies for COVID-19 prevention and treatment (biomedical intervention, public health recommendations, alternative care), as well as five distinct vaccine narratives. Findings were translated into recommendations for local medical outreach and patient support services.