What have you been up to since graduating from Bowdoin?
I'll say that in the broadest sense, as someone who majored in environmental studies and anthropology, my path has been about how to incorporate those disciplines. I've vacillated between working with unhoused communities and with people diagnosed with mental illness, to doing wilderness therapy, to doing sailing and sea education on a sailboat. I went to grad school to get my master's degree in anthropology in New York, where I focused on different experiences of displacement, such as homelessness, land loss, and dementia, even though these experiences may seem disparate. After the master's program, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and pursued a doctoral degree. My doctoral work was based in an Alaskan Native village, and was focused on subsistence fishing and care practices. I just finished that last August, in 2021, and right now I am a postdoc at the Center for Health Outcomes and Population Equity at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Why anthropology?
My PhD advisor described ethnographic fieldwork as a practice of learning to care about what other people care about. My parents exposed me to a number of eye-opening experiences growing up, and I think anthropology invites us to ponder human experience and why people do the things they do.