Person

Fleuriet, K. Jill

"I am a medical and cultural anthropologist of and from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. My shorter-term applied projects also extend into San Antonio, Texas. My body of work engages central questions in medical anthropological research: how and why cultural practices, discourses, and structures shape health outcomes and health care experiences. I draw from theories of structural violence and social suffering as well as feminist and borderlands theories of intersectionality. I integrate the idea of borderlands as productive, creative spaces within a broad political economy framework to understand the ways in which geopolitical borders and definitions of citizenship shape well-being of these regions. I use intersectionality in several ways: as a means by which to understand how and why people foreground different identities during sickness, healing, and health care; how these identities interact, or ‘intersect,’ to produce differential mortality, morbidity, and wellness patterns; and how cultural practices reinforce, reproduce, or resist assumptions about certain identities. In sum, I am deeply interested in how people can and do move through their worlds to be well. I place my work at the crossroads of theoretical and engaged anthropology. My primary research projects revolve around health inequalities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, cultural discourses of these borderlands, care/giving in the United States, and the application of anthropology to improve programming and assessment in local efforts to improve well-being. In my current book project in the borderlands of South Texas, I employ a discursive, comparative analysis of place-making of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by national political actors, the news media and local borderland leaders."