Beth is currently (2024-2025) partnering with researchers at Perelman School of Medicine and Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics to provide qualitative research for a pilot randomized clinical trial investigating the potential pathways through which unconditional cash transfers may influence health. Beth is conducting extensive interviews to identify the mechanisms through which cash transfers delivered in a health care context might influence the health of people living with chronic diseases in the United States.

Beth collaborated with researchers at PEACH Lab, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania to investigate the impact of the pandemic on food access in Philadelphia. She conducted extensive in-depth interviews with Philadelphians and people who work with the charitable food system in the city to ascertain challenges and innovative ways that local organizations are collaborating to address food insecurity.

Beth authored a peer-reviewed article based on evaluation data collected in partnership with Stenton Historic House for their PEW-funded project about public memorials, enslavement and arts-based community engagement. Drawing on data collected throughout the project, this article argues that historic house museums need to move from “community participation” to “community integration” in their efforts to forefront racial equity.

Laurian and Beth co-published an article exploring the affinity between feminist ethnographic research methods and a politically attuned epistemology of the senses, what we call a “sensory feminist orientation to ethnography.” Through a series of field notes exchanged during research in Belize and Ghana, they explore the benefits of attuning to embodiment and “bodily ways of knowing” in the field, and the consequences when ethnographers are encouraged to excise certain field encounters from scholarship.

Beth collaborated with fellow anthropologist Anastasia Hudgins (together as Ethnologica) as qualitative researchers with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, Division of Substance Use and Harm Reduction. They interviewed Philadelphians who lost a family member to opioid overdose with the goal of improving harm reduction programming in the city. Qualitative data reveal that existing health disparities and structural barriers to treatment increase vulnerability to overdose. In an article published with The International Journal of Drug Policy, they highlight the urgency to collaborate with impacted families and communities to design relevant harm reduction interventions. They argue that without simultaneous efforts to redress the longterm consequences of ‘war on drug’ policies, however, harm reduction interventions will not reach their full potential.

Beth published a piece with Anthropology Now that explores how visual and sensory ethnographic methods enhance participatory research in complex urban settings. The agitation and synergy between ethnography and socially engaged art can be productive of a kind of collective scrutiny of “community participation” amid ongoing racialized disenfranchisement and cultural marginalization. Embracing tensions and failures can lend transparency to processes of community-driven change.

Beth collaborated with fellow anthropologist Anastasia Hudgins (together as Ethnologica) and researchers from John Hopkins, Harvard, and UPenn to investigate the impact of the sugar sweetened beverage tax on retailers in Philadelphia. They conducted in-depth interviews with corner stores and food retailers throughout Philadelphia to provide policy recommendations to other cities considering similar legislation.

In a peer-reviewed article published with Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research, they detail retailer concerns to inform the framing and implementation of beverage taxes in other interested jurisdictions. Retailers especially desired transparency in governmental tax revenue spending. We argue that increased investment in educational outreach to retailers about the tax may help address misconceptions and improve implementation.

Siobhan and Beth co-published a research article with Medical Anthropology Quarterly documenting the gendered impacts of health reform in Belize, Central America.

In this article, they foreground a particular moment in Belizean health history—the rise and demise of multisectoral collaboration—to question what can constitute meaningful community participation in the midst of health reform. Their longterm ethnographic field research with rural health providers including Indigenous healers and community nurse aides reveals that ongoing health reform is removing providers from participatory arenas. While providers, the majority women, are palliating the consequences of neoliberal reform they are also contesting the consumer “logic” of this reform through mutual aid and community care.