Anthropology

Daniel is an anthropology doctoral student and public health professional broadly interested in how ideas of social change are assembled, circulated, and mobilized — particularly in and through the morally charged arena of health. Grounded in medical anthropology, drawing from linguistic anthropology, and theorizing with science and technology studies, his current project examines the "decolonizing Global Health" movement through collaborative and immersive ethnography with the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Nairobi, Kenya. Through observing and participating in APHRC’s efforts to "decolonize" their public health programming, practices, thinking, and the field of Global Health more broadly, he seeks to understand how ideas of postindependence decolonization are assembled and deployed by these technocrats to critique and reconfigure the global political economy of efforts to better health. In conversation with the anthropology of Global Health, critical theory, and the study of linguistic coloniality, he uses this ethnographic work on "decolonizing Global Health" to think about ongoing changes to global biopolitical/necropolitical governance as well as how signs and discourse developed in Black, revolutionary, and other counterinsurgent spaces are coopted into hegemonic structures.

In addition to this dissertation project, Daniel pursues other endeavors committed to the burgeoning subfield of medical-linguistic anthropology and advancing abolitionist global health theory. With Dr. M. Yunus Rafiq Ph.D. ’17, he is a researcher on a multi-year project studying the semiotics of cancer and the global political economy of medical language in Coastal Tanzania. Retaining his connections to Global Health, he leads and contributes to various efforts to assemble anti-hegemonic, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist global public health thinking and infrastructures. A future project will explore how incommunicability, medical racism, and raciolinguistic ideologies are reproduced in image-based learning in American medical education. In all, he social change, health, and morality in the service of abolitionist and liberatory movements.

Previous Degrees

• BA Anthropology, Middlebury College, 2021

• MSPH International Health, Johns Hopkins University, 2023