beth uzwiak

JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS, REVIEWS, REPORTS, TALKS ETC

I have published scholarship on a range of topics including: how ethnographic and artistic research methods enhance place-based community engagement projects (Anthropology Now); how public memorials can engage histories of enslavement (The Public Historian); the resonance between sensory and feminist field methods (The Senses and Society); ways that multi-sensory and artistic research methods can center joy and equity in socially engaged art projects; how photographer Zoe Strauss represents suffering and joy in her I-95 project (Photography and Culture); domestic violence photography and policing (History of Photography); community access to primary health care in Belize (Medical Anthropology Quarterly); legacies of racialized drug policies and opioid overdose (International Journal of Drug Policy); the representation of adversity and death in applied health research (Journal for the Anthropology of North America); and harm reduction strategies in kin networks (Medical Anthropology).

You can read more about my research and scholarship and find my publications here and below.

I hold an MA and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Temple University. My dissertation entitled “Mediating Gender Violence: ‘Witnessing Publics,’ Activism, and the Ethics of Human Rights Claim-Making” explored the intersections between Indigenous and feminist human rights social movements, specifically how activists use text and image to create human rights claims about gender-based violence.  My graduate studies were supported with Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, awarded by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.

A RECENT EXHIBITION REVIEW

(book reviews below)

CAA REVIEWs

A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures

How do we tell the stories of domestic violence? Most domestic violence happens behind closed doors, as does most advocacy to assist survivors. Artist Carmen Winant’s installation brings documentation of abuse and advocacy together through a reconsideration of photographs, newspaper clippings, guidebooks, and other ephemera culled from the archives of Philadelphia-based organization Women in Transition and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Journal Articles

History of Photography

Feminist In/Visibilities: Questions of Consent when Policing Domestic Violence with Photographic Evidence, 2022

Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: US feminist grassroots organising of the 1960s positioned its critique of domestic violence within a social analysis of class, race, sexuality and gender. In subsequent decades, feminist organising largely shifted to service provision which brought collusion with state entities and police in the quest to criminalise domestic violence. Criminalisation introduced a demand for corroborative evidence including the use of photographs to ‘prove’ violence as enacted on victims’ bodies. Through a consideration of the history of domestic violence photography and ethnographic data gathered with women residing in a domestic violence shelter, I explore how domestic violence photographs can reinforce entrenched gendered and racialised inequities and engender new ones. In many states, evidence-based prosecution does not rely on victim testimony and can be used without the consent of the harmed person. Rather than simply a mechanism of state control, however, the meaning and utility of evidentiary photographs remain unstable. Ethnographic data suggest that photographs and videos of domestic violence reverberate within and beyond the logics of state violence. I argue that photographic consent emerges as a vector to consider alternatives to criminal prosecution via policing.

Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness

Framing Kin Resistance to Opioid Overdose in Philadelphia, 2022

Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: Interviews with close kin of those who died from opioid overdose in Philadelphia in 2017 reveal myriad strategies that families employ to minimize overdose risk, secure treatment options, and mitigate everyday precarity that can result from heroin addiction. Their efforts to keep kin alive – at times contradictory, conflicted, desperate and, in the end, ineffectual – reveal deeply situated structural vulnerabilities. When understood as “resistance” to death, however, kin strategies return us to a vital tenet of harm reduction – the imperative to develop programs in collaboration with those most impacted, in this case families at risk of overdose fatality.

Journal for the Anthropology of North America

Quit Ditching the Love: Kinship and Death from Opioid Overdose in Philadelphia, 2022

Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: Collected in the context of death, I discuss data from interviews with grieving families to consider how and if representing pain contributes to interventions aimed at reducing structural vulnerability to drug overdose. I suggest that documenting and taking seriously next of kin’s experiences with death and the threat of death can substantiate the need for harm reduction programs and policy, corroborating the utility of qualitative approaches to applied health research.

The Public Historian

Memorializing Dinah and Reckoning with Enslavement: Community Integration, Arts-based Emplacement and Racial Justice at Stenton Historic House in Philadelphia, 2021

Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: Inequality in Bronze is a two-year project (2018–20) reckoning with the history of slavery at Stenton, a plantation house museum in Philadelphia, by commissioning a new memorial to Dinah, a woman enslaved at the property in the mid-1700s. Drawing on data collected throughout the project, this article argues that historic house museums need to move from “community participation” to “community integration” in their efforts to forefront racial equity. This article asks how we can redress centuries of erasure and the absence of Black lives at historic sites. It offers points of consideration for other historic house museums contemplating similar projects as the collective work to address the legacies of American enslavement continues.

The Senses and Society

Special Issue: The Ethnographic Palimpsest: Excursions in Paul Stoller’s Sensory Poetics, edited by Beth Uzwiak and Laurian Bowles, 2021

Introduction

Beth Uzwiak and Laurian Bowles

ABSTRACT: This special issue commemorates the thirty-year legacy of Paul Stoller’s scholarship and highlights his continuing influence on sensory theory, method and writing going forward.In reflecting on the distinctive contribution of the essays in this special issue, we found ourselves thinking about the palimpsest, a term used most often to refer to a manuscript in which the original work has been erased or over-written, even as older markings may be seen beneath. Conceptually, the term palimpsest has been taken up in the fields of urban history and archeology to describe the tangible archival and material culture that await excavation and interpretation by those who encounter them. In a similar vein, we find the concept of a palimpsest useful to trace the process of sensory fieldwork becoming scholarship. Here, it is useful to consider field notes as archeological layers of ethnography: what we write, discard or erase only to revisit or build upon later.

The Senses and Society

Epistolary Storytelling: A Feminist Sensory Orientation to Ethnography, 2021

Beth Uzwiak and Laurian Bowles

ABSTRACT: This article presents a series of letters the authors exchanged while conducting ethnographic research in Belize and Ghana. The letters reveal an affinity between feminist ethnographic praxis and a politically attuned epistemology of the senses, what the authors call a sensory feminist orientation to scholarship. Expanding on criticism of the way sensory hierarchies inform Western knowledge-building, the authors reevaluate their own epistolary exchange as a methodological provocation. As stories, the letters detail what the authors orient themselves toward in the field, as well as embodied moments of disorientation: danger, violence and estrangement. Untidy and raw, they offer readers an opportunity to “listen to sense” and, in the process, consider the consequences when ethnographers are encouraged to excise certain field encounters from scholarship. The article includes paintings that Beth Uzwiak created while in the field as a component of the authors’ sensory experiment in epistolary ethnography. Their focus on the affective registers of storytelling contributes to broader efforts to disrupt the androcentric tendencies of ethnographic voice.

International Journal of Drug Policy

Legacies of the War on Drugs: Next of Kin of Persons Who Died of Opioid Overdose and Harm Reduction Interventions in Philadelphia, 2021

B Uzwiak, A Hudgins, L Pizzicato

ABSTRACT: Between the years 2017–2019 in Philadelphia, more than 70% of all deaths from opioid overdose occurred in a private residence. To learn more about home-based opioid use and overdose, researchers conducted qualitative interviews with next of kin of overdose victims to learn their perceptions about the decedent's drug use and their opinions about city-led harm reduction efforts, specifically naloxone administration and collaborative efforts to open an overdose prevention site. In 2019, researchers conducted 35 qualitative interviews with next of kin of persons who died of opioid overdose in Philadelphia in 2017. Data were coded and analyzed using NVivo software. Data reveal that while persons who use drugs may benefit from enhanced harm reduction interventions that target their family members and caregivers including naloxone education and public health messaging about overdose prevention, these efforts may be up against other realities that Philadelphia families navigate—in particular structural inequalities exacerbated by decades of “War on Drugs” policies. Existing health disparities and structural barriers to care increase vulnerability to overdose and highlight the urgency to collaborate with impacted families and communities to design relevant harm reduction interventions. Without efforts to redress the consequences of war on drug policies, however, harm reduction interventions will not reach their full potential.

Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research

A Qualitative Study on Retailer Experiences with Philadelphia’s Sweetened Beverage Tax

S Hua, B Uzwiak, A Hudgins, A Peterhans, H Lawman, S Bleich, J Falbe, C Roberto

ABSTRACT: Prior research has shown that while retailers worry about the impact a beverage tax would have on sales, many pass the tax onto consumers as a strategy to mitigate loss. This paper uncovers additional retailer concerns that can inform the framing and implementation of beverage taxes in other interested jurisdictions. Retailers especially desired transparency in governmental tax revenue spending. Increased investment in educational outreach to retailers about the tax may help address misconceptions and improve implementation.

Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment

Barriers to effective care: Specialty Drug Treatment in Philadelphia

A Hudgins, B Uzwiak, L Pizzicato, K Viner

ABSTRACT: In 2019, fentanyl was detected in 76% of drug-related deaths and 94% of opioid-involved deaths in Philadelphia. While much attention has been directed at the public face of the city's drug problem, more than 75% of drug deaths in 2017 took place in a private residence. Based on qualitative research to understand the vulnerabilities of this hidden population of drug users, we interviewed kin of 35 people who had died of opioid overdose in 2017 to learn whether their loved one had interacted with any social services or harm-reduction interventions. In our demographically and geographically representative sample of decedents, we found that while most had received treatment at least once, many faced barriers to getting treatment when they needed it, including barriers related to stigma, structural racism, gender inequities, bureaucracy, insurance requirements, and cost. We argue that these barriers place an undue burden on people with substance use disorder and their kin during particularly fraught moments of heightened vulnerability. The failure of state and federal policies, practices, and infrastructure to address these barriers, and the failure to require that evidence-based care be provided during treatment have deleterious effects on people affected by the opioid epidemic in the United States.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND CULTURE

Make of this Whatever You Want: Violence and Intimacy in the Photography of Zoe Strauss, 2018

Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: Over the course of ten years, during the first Saturday in May, photographer Zoe Strauss exhibited photos for three hours on cement pillars beneath elevated portions of Interstate 1-95 in Philadelphia. Strauss’s street photographs are often violent and unapologetic: a woman unzips her jeans to show a hysterectomy scar; another woman huddles to light a crack pipe; a vacant - eyed elderly woman stands in an abandoned lot clutching a dog, her unbuttoned nightdress and coat reveal that she is naked. This essay traces the evolution of Strauss’s I-95 project, drawing upon her writings, reviews of Strauss’s work, attendance at several of her under I-95 exhibits, and an interview with the artist. I propose that Strauss’s methodology with I-95 – how she made and exhibited photographic work – engaged viewers in the “everyday” of urban restructuring. By “everyday” I mean the ordinary and messy making and unmaking of lives in the midst of structural forces often beyond our control. I approach Strauss’s photographs through the lens of deindustrialization in Philadelphia, the representational uncertainties that her images evoke, and her resonance with other social documentarians who offer us ordinary moments as extraordinary ones.

Anthropology Now

Community Engagement in Precarious Times: When Ethnography Meets Socially Engaged Art, 2016

Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: In this piece, I explore how visual and sensory methods enhance participatory research in complex urban settings. I argue that disciplinary blurring that may be the most productive way to proceed when art, research and action coalesce in complex demographic arenas. The agitation and synergy between ethnography and socially engaged art can be productive of a kind of collective scrutiny of “community participation” amid ongoing racialized disenfranchisement and marginalization. Embracing tensions and failures are first steps to a more robust community engagement process.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Gendering the Burden of Care: Health Reform and the Paradox of Community Participation in Western Belize, 2016

Siobhan Curran and Beth Uzwiak

ABSTRACT: Belizean health policy supports a primary health care (PHC) strategy of universal access, community participation, and multisectoral collaboration. The principals of PHC were a key part of Belize's emergent national identity and built on existing community-based health strategies. Ethnographic research in western Belize, however, reveals that ongoing health reform is removing providers from participatory arenas. In this article, we foreground a particular moment in Belizean health history—the rise and demise of multisectoral collaboration—to question what can constitute meaningful community participation in the midst of health reform. Many allied health providers continue to believe in the potential of PHC to alleviate the structural causations of poor health and to invest in PHC despite a lack of state support. This means that providers, the majority women, are palliating the consequences of neoliberal reform; it also means that they provide spaces of contestation to the consumer “logic” of this reform.

BOOK REVIEWS

Uzwiak, Beth. Review of Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well-being in the World (Paul Stoller. Chicago: University Press, 2014). Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2016.

Uzwiak, Beth. Review of How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Mary K. Coffey. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) Visual Studies.  19 Mar 2013.

BOOK CHAPTERS

HANDBOOK OF SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY

Edited by Phillip Vannini

Multisensory storytelling: inciting polyvocal polemics in participatory ethnography, 2023

Beth Uzwiak

In this chapter, I reflect on my participation as an applied ethnographer part of a “community catalyst” residency in North Philadelphia.  For two years, I collaborated with an artist collective, local non-profits and residents to document local histories and assets while addressing long-term histories of racialized disinvestment. To do so, we transformed an underutilized historic house into a public platform for experiments in civic engagement.  I consider how sensory ethnographic methods contributed to these efforts, including what I call walking laments and stoop speakeasies, as well as multimodal installations of photographs, youth-made videos and audio clips from oral history interviews.  These sensory experiments in storytelling brought community legacies to the fore while contesting typical “outside” representations of the neighborhood.  In particular, I consider how multisensory storytelling captured a polyvocal polemic that moved the project from documenting local assets to challenging the knowledge extraction often embedded in development projects, offering methodological considerations for a more equitable engagement process.

feminist activist anthropology: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America

Edited by Crista Craven and Dana-Ain Davis

Fracturing Feminism: Activism and Ethics in a Women’s Human Rights NGO

Beth Uzwiak

In this chapter, I explore my participation as an activist researcher and ethnographer at an international human rights agency in New York City. Since its grassroots inception in the 1980s, this agency transformed into an NGO with close ties to the transnational human rights system. Here, activists create human rights claims in a highly pressured, deadline driven, and politically complicated environment. My research reveals a dramatic disconnection between its feminist mission and the façade it creates to maintain its legitimacy within the global human rights arena. I argue that structures of neoliberal governmentality—specifically managerialism and forms of citizenship that emphasize self-regulation and responsibility—compromise WIHRA’s feminist and activist stance. In the fissures between the rhetoric and the reality of the agency arises an “embodiment of fear” –or an NGO environment of workers who are ideologically committed to women’s human rights but, because of this commitment, do no openly refute their own mistreatment within the agency.

BOOK

SOME RECENT TALKS

“Participatory, Collaborative and Feminist Community-based Research Methods.” Invited lecturer, Ethnographic Research Methods | Davidson College. (2022).

“Storytelling in Community-led Design Praxis: From Process to Product.” Invited lecturer, Weitzman School of Design | Graduate Integrative Design Studio. (2021).

“Retrospective Sensibilities and Future Orientations to Paul Stoller’s Sensuous Scholarship.” Uncommon Senses III: Back to the Future of the Senses. Invited presentation and discussant, Centre for Sensory Studies | University of Concordia, Montreal. With Laurian Bowles. (2021).

“Dying Alone, Dying at Home: Qualitative Research with Next of Kin of Opioid Overdose Victims.” Research paper | International Society for Medical Anthropology Conference, Havana, Cuba. (2020).

“Envisioning Futures Beyond Refining.” Interactive workshop for day-long convening | Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. (2019).

“Between River, Rail and Row Home: Public Health and the Industrial Development of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers from 1840 to 1940.”  Fellowship Colloquium | Library Company of Philadelphia. (2019).

“What does ‘community’ have to do with it? Ethnography, evaluation and arts-based engagement in historic site management.”  Stuart Weitzman Graduate Program in Historic Preservation | University of Pennsylvania School of Design. (2019).

“Picturing a Place.” Panelist for muraLAB workshop on cultural asset mapping and social practice art | Moore College of Art and Mural Arts Project (2019).

“Spit Spreads Death: Contemporary Health Implications of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919.” Public Health Research Symposium | The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. (2019).

A FEW RESEARCH REPORTS