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- My graduate training into my PhD research and beyond has been in West Africa.
I was really interested in the ways that cities were being transformed
by global capital in particular and by migration in particular as well.
And so I had worked there for close to a decade
and then after finishing the book manuscript
and writing up several articles,
I was here at Smith and planning a new project that would take me back to Dakar, West Africa,
when my son was actually diagnosed with a very rare form of epilepsy at five months old.
And so for one that meant that I couldn't go back to the field
in the way that I had envisioned initially because his care was centered here in the U.S.
and there were lots of, you know, open questions about what was wrong
and how we would handle it.
And so as we were undergoing treatment for my son
I discovered this, sort of, underground, at the time, world of medical cannabis
which was fascinating in part because so much of the, sort of, scientific thinking
about it was being driven by families and parents and mothers in particular.
And I was really fascinated by the kind of tinkering work they were doing
in order to treat their children and that opened up a kind of new world.
And through that I began to formulate a research project
that was actually considering medical cannabis as a site of scientific practice
but as a site from below in a lot of ways.
So instead of thinking about the ways in which science produces knowledge from above
and that sort of trickles down to patients who use it,
this was a model in which the patients themselves were pushing it largely out of desperation
and out of trying to find some solution to their children's or their own health issues
and that that was driving a brand new industry in large part
that was actually then from above.
I think one of the things that I try to bring into my classroom when it comes to anthropology
is that it really is a tool for thinking about and engaging the world.
There is a limitless set of possibilities that anthropologists in terms of what we can study and
how we study it and really what unites the discipline, what holds us together,
the glue is really the way that we go about asking it,
the way that we frame our questions,
the ways that we try to turn the assumptions we have inside out
to see what's really there in a way.
And what's interesting is that I think especially among female women anthropologists,
we find that our initial project takes us far far away
and then the realities of caregiving and a family,
not even just having children, but having elderly parents
or having other personal obligations here
help ... insist that we think more imaginatively about future research.
And so caregiving has really shaped, I think, the way that anthropology has kind of moved forward.
And I am certainly not alone in the sense that
what I have realized as the parent of a child with medical complexities
has actually shaped the research that has come.
So I've spent a good time, a good deal of time already,
and plan to continue to go back to work with these families
to understand how it is that they are making sense of the really fractured legal landscape
surrounding medical cannabis in the U.S.
How it is that they think about cannabis in moral terms,
sometimes in spiritual terms in quite fascinating ways,
how it is that they think about the possibilities for the future
and where they see prohibition at the federal level going.
And how they think about science perhaps most fascinatingly,
because this is where ... it's often times within families' homes
that this kind of fascinating tinkering is happening
and that what is happening there is,
it ends up being what fuels the industry in a larger way.
That is what scientists and doctors are looking at
to figure out how they can create better cannabis treatments,
how they can standardize the industry,
how they can open up new treatment possibilities.
So I'm really looking at these homes as kind of laboratories,
as kind of legal laboratories and scientific ones as well,
where they're kind of imagining what the possibilities are for care for their child,
but also imagining what the possibilities are at the national level for what might happen as well.
There have been some interesting alliances
between parents of children with epilepsy
and people, veterans for instance, who are using it to treat PTSD,
as well as people who are working on racial justice issues.
And these sort of interesting alliances are what is pushing at local and state levels
change that I think will also have a ripple effect in a way.
So I'm interested in studying how this is actually helping
to unsettle what our notions of medicine are and can be,
how it may be pushing us to think more expansively about what treatment might look like,
and how you, I mean in in many ways,
how this is kind of rewriting the story of what science can be.
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