Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Drexel University
Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Design Anthropology | Environments | Ethnographic Theory | Information/Data Governance | Materials and Materiality | Science & Technology Studies | Sense |
About Ali
My research and teaching focus on 1) environmental health and the politics of care, 2) the spaces in which health and disease are produced (homes, cities, clinics, and public health networks), and 3) how embodied experiences of health and disease are technologically mediated. My first book project has focused on the experiences of asthmatics and environmental sense. I also lead a Philadelphia-based project focused on air quality, sustainability, and health in the context of late industrialism.
Contact
Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Ali's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
The Second Project: Teaching Research through Collaboration
Editor’s Note: This is the third entry in the Second Project Series. You can read the second post here. This series explores an often undiscussed moment in professionalization: the shift from the research you began as a graduate student to the new work undertaken as an early- or mid-career scholar. This series is especially interested in personal journeys and institutional features that enabled or constrained this transition. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Lisa. Monday afternoons at least a dozen students and I gather to work on a collaborative ethnographic project. Some weeks we meet around a long, boardroom style table where we discuss article outlines, literature reviews, and “findings” crafted by our team members. Other weeks we organize around a handful of circular tables where small working groups tackle different pieces of the project—analyzing quantitative data using SPSS, creating GIS maps, coding qualitative survey questions, or co-writing a white paper, (read more...)
Findings From The Asthma Files
It’s been nearly four years since The Asthma Files (TAF) really took off (as a collaborative ethnographic project housed on an object-oriented platform). In that time our work has included system design and development, data collection, and lots of project coordination. All of this continues today; we’ve learned that the work of designing and building a digital archive is ongoing. By “we” I mean our “Installation Crew”, a collective of social scientists who have met almost every week for years. We’ve also had scores of students, graduate and undergraduates at a number of institutions, use TAF in their courses, through independent studies, and as a space to think through dissertations. In a highly distributed, long-term, ethnographic project like TAF, we’ve derived a number of modest findings from particular sites and studies; the trick is to make sense of the patterned mosaic emerging over time, which is challenging since the very (read more...)