Who am I?

When I consider who I am as a researcher and how I can describe my own philosophical assumptions, I think back to where I began as a scholar—in anthropology. I was taught that presenting biases—describing where you come from and how you approached the work you did—is an integral part of any project, publication, presentation, or even conversation. We all come from somewhere; we are all people with pasts and presents that shape how we do our work, so we must present ourselves as honestly as possible to allow the people who are receiving what we share to make informed decisions as they connect with it. I always found this component of anthropological work reflective of what I loved about the faculty I worked with, evidencing a certain self-awareness and directness in intention, as well as acknowledgment of the complications inherent in doing any research. This is the root of the researcher statement I present here.

I am a queer white female from the Southeastern part of the United States. I am a product and reflection of my generation (as I think of it), seeking to find and fulfill a purpose while also hoping to shed constraint and expectation. I have felt sexism and heteronormativism because of who I am and the place I come from, where women are still expected to marry men and have children, have long hair, and smile. But I also know I hold a great deal of privilege because of who I am and how that is constructed and construed in our society. As a result, I am constantly working to know my privilege and what it means for me and others that I hold it. I am a feminist rooted in critical intersectional race and feminist theory. I am a relativist, a constructivist, a constant learner, and an anthropologist. I found my passion in women’s sexual and reproductive health research and ethnography. I built on those passions with work in biological anthropology and globalization, qualitative biomedical research and HIV prevention, quantitative family planning research, and my most recent work with reproductive justice, technology, and community in the US. My experiences have led me to this passion and will continue to shape how it changes as time passes.

I remember the day that I was sitting in an anthropology lecture and realized that I believed that everything is relative, all understandings are subjective, and there is no absolute truth, only what each person believes. This belief is only reinforced by the experiences I have had since. I see how differently everyone perceives the world, how different two people’s understandings of the contents of one conversation can be, yet they both walk away knowing what was said. But while I do believe we all have different truths, even though each of us has many truths that we often hold in ourselves at any given moment, I also think that there are patterns in how our society has been constructed. There are certain truths that are being constantly recreated by those with power in our society to bolster their dominance and maintain a concentration of health, wealth, and control at the expense of others. These truths are buried deep into the fabric of our social structure and operations, which ever-changing culture has often shifted to re-cover as the costs of this social structure have been named and called out as unjust. And while grappling with this structure and attempting to understand and remediate the disparities, inequities, and inequalities I see in our society is sometimes daunting, I feel that I can aide in this process along with my peers. I believe in freedom of choice and reproductive rights, and I want to fight for reproductive justice. But I also believe that as a researcher and activist, I cannot simply advocate for someone because of what I believe. I must know the truth—the needs, desires, hopes, constraints, and challenges—of whoever I am advocating with to work towards co-created goals.

I believe that purely quantitative research can be very useful if approached with a strong theoretical grounding and awareness of its many limitations. But as an anthropologist I do not feel there is heart in purely quantitative work. People’s stories, their lived experiences and feelings and ideas and priorities, are what make ‘research’ feel like it may achieve its goal of improving the human condition. And while I feel this, I also know that public health research aspired to be an ‘objective’ practice, and numbers are generally what has an impact in our positivist, biomedical world. That is why I got my MPH at Berkeley—to gain the skills to speak the quantitative language with the intention to carry out mixed methods research to tell the stories of individuals and communities. I am pushing myself further to realize this research, even nascently. I want to ask difficult questions of the world, exploring connections between humans and their environments that require transcending traditional ways of doing research and assigning value to seek effective understanding and solutions.

Through research and action, I aspire to further the causes of communities and give them power rather than taking it away. Using research approaches, technology, and communication as tools, I will work creatively and inductively toward these goals.