Description
Neighborhood characteristics such as deteriorating housing, crime levels and rental instability can affect human health, from changes in weight to accelerated cellular aging. We are an interdisciplinary research team working within ELEMENT (Early Life Exposures in Mexico to ENvironmental Toxicants), an ongoing, 20-year birth cohort that has collected biological samples and physical assessments from 600 mother-child pairs located throughout Mexico City. Recently, detailed ethnographic information has been collected on ELEMENT families and neighborhoods, which will allow us to examine how housing turnover and insecurity affect susceptibility to environmental chemicals and influence anthropometry and molecular measures of health (DNA methylation, telomere length). By linking molecular, epidemiological, and environmental information to ethnographically observed neighborhood conditions we can investigate how neighborhoods get under the skin.
Accomplishments (6)
Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City
$1,000,000 grant from the National Science Foundation
Gendered Environments: Making Global Health Knowledge in Working-Class Mexico City Neighborhoods
$7,500 grant from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) Sister Fund for Global Health
Bioethnography: Developing New Methods in Epidemiological and Anthropological Research
Presented at Collaborations Across Anthropology and Genetics: Examples of Transdisciplinary Work, New Orleans, LA
What Gets Inside: Protective Porosity in Mexico City
Presented at the STS Colloquium, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
Bio-ethnography: A How to Guide for the Twenty First Century
Published in A Handbook of Biology and Society
What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City
Published in Cultural Anthropology