Faculty (Anthropology)

I work between cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology to study how ideas, logics, norms and values are authorized, enacted, institutionalized, and scaled as expertise. I conduct my fieldwork in the United States, where experts influence most every aspect of contemporary life, if often in the face of significant public skepticism. 

My research focuses on professions that take human behavior and interiority as the object of their expertise: social work, counseling psychology, and behavioral health.  Dually appointed in the Crown School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, I am dedicated to illuminating how the helping professions distill historically traceable debates and predominant logics about agency, care, communication, (in)dependence, personhood, presence, science, and truth.  My first book, Scripting Addiction, is an ethnography of mainstream American addiction treatment.  My second, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (2023), is an ethnography that chronicles the remarkable spread of a behavioral health method, called motivational interviewing, and the pragmatism that infuses it.  

My current project is a study of Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT). It seeks to understand how an iconic therapy animal with a rich service history—the American Dog—is trained and deployed in a variety of clinical and social service settings. This project extends my ongoing inquiry into the social histories, logics and economics of therapeutic practices and institutions, as well as my broader interest in expertise.  Specifically, it asks how and why American dogs have increasingly come to be seen as expert communicators and caregivers—particularly in an age when more and more American humans grapple with our lack of care for other species.