A Professional Pivot: Bringing Cultural Expertise to Public Health Practice and Program Development

As a medical anthropologist and reproductive health researcher, my work focuses on intersections; I “live” in the Venn diagram of HIV/AIDS, gender, reproduction, and the social and physiological meanings of bodies across cultures. Over time, my trajectory expanded across disciplines as I trained as both an anthropologist and a public health practitioner. This article reflects on the professional pivots and institutional redirections that shaped this dual identity. Moving between disciplinary “homes,” I helped establish undergraduate global health programs at two small liberal arts universities while maintaining long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana and the United States. Each milestone illustrated how anthropological insights enrich public health, and how learning the language of public health allows anthropologists to communicate findings to broader audiences. Drawing on these experiences, I explore the challenges and possibilities of translating ethnographic knowledge into policy-relevant conversations. Ultimately, I argue that applied anthropologists are uniquely positioned to connect lived, contextualized human experiences with global public health interventions. This journey underscores how practicing contemporary anthropology often requires a pivot; learning new institutional and intellectual languages, all while remaining firmly grounded in our core ethnographic commitment to understanding people’s lives in context.