Assistant Professor
Email: taliziv@txstate.edu
Phone: 512.245.8272
Office: ELA 239
Curriculum Vitae
Education:
University of Michigan, BA
University of Michigan, MPH
University of Pennsylvania, PhD
Research Interests:
Public Health and Inequality, Political Economy, Drugs and Addiction, Urban Studies, Informal Labor and Economies; Incarceration; Race and Racialization
My core research interests lie at the intersection of inequality, political economy, health, and race/racialization. Theoretically, I explore the political, economic, and legal structures that reproduce inequality and racialized health disparities in the United States, alongside how people experience and navigate these structures. This research situates U.S. racial and economic inequality in a global frame. My applied medical anthropological and public health research examines the health care and social service systems that interface with deep poverty, drug use, and violence and asks how these systems can be improved to meet the needs of structurally vulnerable populations. Before completing my PhD in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, I received an MPH from the University of Michigan in Global Health and Health Behavior and Health Equity.
My first book project, "The Treatment Game: The Street, The State, and the Global Politics of Recovery," is a story about the relationship between the streets and clinical recovery in nonprofit drug treatment in Philadelphia. The book argues that the process of recovering from drug and alcohol addiction requires the diagnosis and anchoring of problems in the past to chart a vision for the future. Based on three years of ethnographic research in a network of court-mandated, Medicaid-funded, and Black-owned drug treatment providers, the book is grounded in three interrelated political transformations of the late 1990s: the privatization of healthcare; the rise of mass incarceration; and the proliferation of street-based labor markets due to widening inequality. My research shows how the state relied upon the nonprofit, Medicaid-funded healthcare market alongside the courts and the jails to govern the streets through drug treatment care. City government recruited upwardly mobile Black and Brown entrepreneurs who had “recovered” from street-based life to care for their own communities by opening healthcare centers. The Treatment Game argues that in this context, the clinical concept of recovery depoliticizes the material conditions of economic precarity that shape the streets – urban informality – to have three, primary effects: first, it constructs a local biology of addiction from the material conditions of urban informality, and in doing so, makes and remakes race in the context of the U.S. city. Second, the book argues that the clinical concept of recovery obfuscates the political and economic entanglements that render the streets structurally integral to – and continuous with – the functioning of Philadelphia’s public health and welfare state. Once state-funded nonprofit healthcare markets are placed in relationship to the streets that they treat, we see that nonprofit healthcare markets operate in dynamic relationship to street-based markets – or, as they are referred to in this context: “games.” It is at the intersection of the streets and nonprofit healthcare where the treatment game is born. And third, the book argues that though clinical recovery presents drug treatment as a contrast to carceral techniques of incarceration and racialization, it actually operates alongside and in conjunction with these techniques rather than as a progressive alternative to them. The clinical concept of recovery meets and blurs with the political concept of progress, materially anchoring racialized communities to a problematic past from which they must recover to progress into the future.
My current public health research, both independent and collaborative, ranges from program evaluation work on policing programs, harm reduction and housing strategies that seek to provide services to people who use drugs. This research is both exploratory and mixed-methods, examining and demonstrating the relationship between street-based informal labor, incarceration, and negative health outcomes. My next book project focuses on the dismantling of Medicaid infrastructure and the rise of incarceration in poor, rural communities in the United States.