As a cultural and medical anthropologist, my research focuses on health inequalities, biomedicine, and global health. Additional areas of expertise and theoretical interest include science studies, infectious disease, humanitarianism, and postsocialism. I have conducted extensive research in Georgia (the Caucasus) about transformations in the material and discursive realities of biomedical knowledge production, and shifting relationships between illness, medicine, the state and the global health philanthropic industry.

My previous research investigated responses to tuberculosis in Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, focusing on the implementation of a global WHO-based protocol for TB control. Through an ethnographic study anchored at the National Tuberculosis Program in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital city, I conducted interviews and participant observation in administrative, laboratory, clinical, and carceral settings. My research investigated how Georgian service providers navigate changes in what counts as “expert knowledge,” and the actual versus expected results of a so-called technical solution for disease management that is at once cultural, political, and biological. I have produced a book manuscript from this project titled Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Epidemics in post-Soviet Georgia, which is currently in press with Vanderbilt University Press. In the book I examine the DOTS approach as a standardized biomedical form of governance that reorganizes the social field of contagion and intervention. In examining cultural and political aspects of DOTS implementation in Georgia, I propose that in its standardization, DOTS multiplies and reproduces the very disease it is designed to combat. The insights Free Market Tuberculosis provides about Georgia also contribute to broader conversations in the social sciences about infectious disease, global health paradigms and interventions, and postsocialism.

In summer 2011 I completed research for a short-term (2 summer) project about the health effects of displacement among populations forced to flee their homes during civil wars in Georgia. My research examined the role of humanitarian and aid organizations in providing medical and social care. I worked in a small city in western Georgia near the Abkhaz border where I focused on internally displaced persons (IDPs) who remain displaced from the civil war between Abkhazia and Georgia that took place in 1992-1993. Topics central to this project include the health effects of war and protracted displacement, and the administrative and institutional aspects of health needs assessment and service distribution by governmental and aid organizations. I am currently analyzing my data and preparing publications based on this research. In journal articles I will address, among other things, how global health and humanitarianism interventions produce moral claims to organize institutions, social spaces, and diagnoses as they bring relief—and distress—to displaced populations.

Other research interests that I will pursue in subsequent projects include incarceration and health inequalities in Kentucky, and cultural politics of microbes and bacteriophage science and treatments for infectious disease in humans in postsocialist Georgia.