Beth Uzwiak, PhD

Beth Uzwiak, PhD (she/they) is a researcher, scholar, and artist.  She holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and specializes in ethnographic and other qualitative research methods. As Founder & Director, Beth provides strategic direction for story research, ensuring that our work is both innovative and grounded in community-driven sustainability. 

Beth partners with organizations and teams to conduct research, evaluate programs, and co-create community engagement strategies and artistic interventions.  Her portfolio includes projects in public art and memorials, public humanities, place-based arts and culture, civic engagement, environmental justice and stewardship, equitable development and community-led design, museum engagement and exhibition, health equity, food sovereignty, and human rights.

ARTS AND CULTURE

Beth is interested in ways that public art and participatory research can engage residents in their own communities. To this end, she is currently evaluator for Rain Poetry, a city-wide project of Pennsylvania Humanities Council that will install youth-penned haikus in five Philadelphia neighborhoods to activate literacy in public spaces.

Beth is also collaborating with Susannah Laramee Kidd to co-lead and design a community participatory evaluation strategy with Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to measure the impacts of Love Where You Live, a three-year greening program for the Nicetown and Tioga neighborhoods of Philadelphia.  This “green vision” plan emerged from an in-depth collaboration between community members and leaders and established neighborhood health and wellness priorities including increasing access to fresh food and restoring the tree canopy.  PHS is now piloting a new place-based model that focuses on long-term, neighborhood-driven transformation. 

PARTICIPATORY METHODS

Beth brings deep cultural competency to her work and prioritizes equity frameworks and participatory methods that are inclusive and that contribute to the vitality of neighborhoods and communities.  She is motivated by the potential of community-driven data (and public art and storytelling) to activate changes that are meaningful to residents, sustainable with local networks, and that correct policies that cause inequality. She works alongside project participants to co-develop engagement and documentation strategies that are non-extractive—that honor the time, expertise and experience of various community members and that celebrate and amplify the cultural richness that exists within communities. 

For example, during a Community Catalyst Residency at Hatfield House in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia, she collaborated with artist collective Amber Art & Design and Fairmount Park Conservancy to steward a cultural asset mapping process which culminated in the production of a community-designed deck of playing cards celebrating local musicians, athletes, artists, and activists.  In another example, Beth was evaluator for Inequality in Bronze: Monumental Plantation Legacies, a project of Stenton Historic House Museum in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia that used community storytelling to commission a site-specific memorial to honor Dinah, a woman who was once enslaved at the property. 

In these and other projects, Beth co-designs and plans installations, exhibitions, festivals, parades and other interactive platforms to showcase local histories, collect data, and evaluate arts initiatives. Past examples include Spit Spreads Death (Mütter Museum and Blast Theory), an interactive parade and exhibition commemorating 100-year legacy of the 1918-9 influenza pandemic in Philadelphia, and Playgrounds for Useful Knowledge (Mural Arts and Cohabitation Strategies), an action research and social practice art project that piloted civic experiments to discuss land occupation, gentrification, environmental restoration, and housing in South Philadelphia.  As urban ethnographer and community organizer for this project,  Beth co-created community events and participatory data collection activities while activating a hub space in a former vacant lot.  The project culminated in a large cultural festival and a book reflecting on the experiment and its learnings. Beth contributed an essay to the book, which can be found here.

HEALTH EQUITY RESEARCH

Beth also provides qualitative research for high-level, mixed methods studies to improve health equity, including research design, data collection and analysis, and writing.  Early in her career, she worked as a counselor at a domestic violence crisis shelter and at a residential drug treatment facility for women transitioning from incarceration. Her training in trauma-informed and intersectional feminist counseling methods and restorative justice remain central to her work.  She has directed qualitative and mixed methods research projects across a range of content areas including long-term ethnography in North and Central America as part of her dissertation and as part of a collaborative study documenting factors that impact equitable access to primary health care in Belize.

Recent research collaborations include a study with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health conducting research with families who have lost loved ones to opioid overdose with the goal of improving harm reduction programming, and one with the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania documenting the impact of COVID-19 on food access and household food security in Philadelphia.  She is currently partnering with this research team on the qualitative component of a randomized control trial investigating the impact that unconditional cash payments may have on health decision-making for people with existing health conditions.

SCHOLARSHIP

Beth holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Temple University.  Beth has published widely on a variety of topics including: ethnography as a tool for place-based community engagement (Anthropology Now); how public memorials can engage histories of enslavement (The Public Historian); the representation of suffering and joy in Zoe Strauss’s I-95 photographic project (Photography and Culture); domestic violence photography and policing (History of Photography); the resonance between sensory and feminist field methods (The Senses and Society) and series of articles about harm reduction and health equity. She also writes exhibition and book reviews. You can read more about her research and scholarship and find her publications here.