My work has drawn on critical religious studies, postcolonial theory, and theories of the psyche to examine trajectories of science and medicine from the Caribbean to North America and back. I am the Director of the Medical Anthropology PhD Program.

My current work is on Internal Family Systems. IFS understands the psyche as comprised of a multiplicity of beings. Unlike other psychological modalities that use the concept of parts, IFS holds that each of these beings is a complete persona, to be approached as one would approach any person. My current research is a collaboration with an IFS colleague, Stephanie Mitchell, exploring the significance of IFS for those who experience non-ordinary states that are deemed psychosis. The project proposes that IFS offers a novel form of intervention, one that is more closely aligned with the insights of those who experience the condition being treated. I am also co-founding with my colleague at UCSF, Joseph Zamaria, the Center on IFS and Culture. This Center brings together university research and work beyond academic walls to think about new possibilities for IFS.




Previous projects

Racialization and Biomedical Ambiguity
My early work analyzed the racialization of disease through biomedicine. My first book, Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetics in the Caribbean (2008 Cornell University Press), was based on anthropological fieldwork in Barbados, and explored how American genomics research on the African diaspora is exporting the American racial system to Caribbean countries. As a result, racial designations in science and medicine in the postcolonial country are hardening along the lines of American race. I have also contributed to analysis of American racialization through a book co-edited with David S. Jones, What's the Use of Race: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (2010 MIT Press). This volume brings together leading social science scholars examining the use of race and genetics in the courtroom and law enforcement, genomic science of human diversity, and inequalities of health and disease.

The "Secular" Care of the Self
My second ethnography rethinks the presumed secularity of the modern healthy subject by examining the Protestant characteristics of multinational techniques of caring for the self. The Secular Care of the Self: Discipline and its Discontents Across the Protestant Atlantic (2024 University of New Mexico Press) explores how our modern “secular” communitas of health is founded historically in a Protestant congregationalism structured by its refusal of ritual, mysticism, and the priest. These latent Protestant commitments are revealed by the conflict that this “secularity” has as it has traveled across the north Atlantic from northern Europe to North America to the Caribbean country of Trinidad, where it confronts ecstatic manifestation, divination, and other troubling religious others. The book is based on fieldwork in southwestern Trinidad, in health clinics, Pentecostal and Presbyterian churches, and among practitioners of the African-Catholic ecstatic religious traditions in Trinidad of Spiritual Baptism and Orisha Worship. The healers and diviners of Orisha worship and Spiritual Baptism engage a world of afflictions that are carried by spirits and entities across long historical arcs of racial betrayal and across spirit regions—revealing a type of spiritual warfare enacted not by the battle between modern secularism and traditional religion but rather between a Protestantist secularity and other religious ways of inhabiting the world.