Claire Snell-Rood


Claire Snell-Rood Entered 2005 cns2n@cms.mail.virginia.edu
Sociocultural Anthropology Regional focus: South Asia (North India) Topical interests: Medical Anthropology, Community Health, Urban anthropology, Applied/Activist Anthropology, Social Inequality. Often, discussions about the health of people living in slums stress their limitations. People elaborate on the dirtiness of slums to express how the environment challenges health; many describe the nutritional deficiencies and low income that they argue stresses family structures. Others argue that government health programs serving slums are inadequate and generally neglect the urban poor. While all of these threats are very real, rarely does the discussion on health in slums ever focus on the resources that the people of slums may mobilize for their own health—be that the strategies they use to access healthcare, the ways that health is practiced within the home, the way that shared resources in the community may contribute to health, or the way that social investment in one place may be able to stabilize health. While research that focuses on the positive aspects of slum life runs the risk of both romanticizing the urban poor and treating “slums” as if they are all the same, I hope that this angle of research can provide an alternative story to the wealth of research stressing the social problems and pathologies of poor urban communities. I will focus my research on one basti, or low-income urban community, in Delhi, India, a city that has grown rapidly especially after the liberalization of the economy in 1991. Like many cities both within India and beyond, Delhi’s urban policy has favored slum clearance and resettlement as the primary way to combat urban poverty. While sometimes planners argue that resettlement of the urban poor is necessary to make room for urban development, at times, it is also argued that the health and well-being of the urban poor would only be improved following clearance of their settlements. However, if poor urban communities contribute to their own health, as some scholars suggest, then this may imply that communities are full of resources…rather than just being a problem to urban planners and NGOs. So how does a white girl from a small town end up with such research aspirations…especially in Delhi, India, a city of 15 million people? While attending UC Berkeley for my BA, I worked as a tutor in the working class city of Richmond, CA and then afterwards, as a PE teacher in Oakland (through the NGO Sports 4 Kids). It was amazing to me how the ideals of the lecture hall and protest sites a few metro stops away became a lot more complicated when they were inserted into this setting. It was one thing to aspire to equal education for all of these kids; it was another thing to practice it realistically, acknowledging the extra tools of strength these kids had and the structures that forced them into needing them. I had an experience following this time teaching that made me want to change my direction. As I spent a summer in Bombay doing similar work, one day sitting in traffic, we were approached by a young kid selling city magazines. I remember asking a local NGO director how it was that there were so many NGOs, yet in every direction, it seemed that the challenges were still there. I went to graduate school, hoping to begin to answer that question through research in India, inspired by my earlier experience studying in Delhi. However, once I got back to Charlottesville and began a small project in a local clinic for low-income people, it seemed that perhaps what was happening outside of the NGO walls might give a better answer. It wasn’t just that NGO approaches to social problems needed to be understood—it’s that we need to understand how communities cope and have resilience. It’s with this hope that I begin my research—aspiring to do research that will build on the strength of communities, using anthropology as a tool.

Entered 2005
cns2n@cms.mail.virginia.edu

Sociocultural Anthropology

Regional focus: South Asia (North India)

Topical interests: Medical Anthropology, Community Health, Urban anthropology, Applied/Activist Anthropology, Social Inequality.

Often, discussions about the health of people living in slums stress their limitations. People elaborate on the dirtiness of slums to express how the environment challenges health; many describe the nutritional deficiencies and low income that they argue stresses family structures. Others argue that government health programs serving slums are inadequate and generally neglect the urban poor. While all of these threats are very real, rarely does the discussion on health in slums ever focus on the resources that the people of slums may mobilize for their own health—be that the strategies they use to access healthcare, the ways that health is practiced within the home, the way that shared resources in the community may contribute to health, or the way that social investment in one place may be able to stabilize health. While research that focuses on the positive aspects of slum life runs the risk of both romanticizing the urban poor and treating “slums” as if they are all the same, I hope that this angle of research can provide an alternative story to the wealth of research stressing the social problems and pathologies of poor urban communities.

I will focus my research on one basti, or low-income urban community, in Delhi, India, a city that has grown rapidly especially after the liberalization of the economy in 1991. Like many cities both within India and beyond, Delhi’s urban policy has favored slum clearance and resettlement as the primary way to combat urban poverty. While sometimes planners argue that resettlement of the urban poor is necessary to make room for urban development, at times, it is also argued that the health and well-being of the urban poor would only be improved following clearance of their settlements. However, if poor urban communities contribute to their own health, as some scholars suggest, then this may imply that communities are full of resources…rather than just being a problem to urban planners and NGOs.

So how does a white girl from a small town end up with such research aspirations…especially in Delhi, India, a city of 15 million people? While attending UC Berkeley for my BA, I worked as a tutor in the working class city of Richmond, CA and then afterwards, as a PE teacher in Oakland (through the NGO Sports 4 Kids). It was amazing to me how the ideals of the lecture hall and protest sites a few metro stops away became a lot more complicated when they were inserted into this setting. It was one thing to aspire to equal education for all of these kids; it was another thing to practice it realistically, acknowledging the extra tools of strength these kids had and the structures that forced them into needing them. I had an experience following this time teaching that made me want to change my direction. As I spent a summer in Bombay doing similar work, one day sitting in traffic, we were approached by a young kid selling city magazines. I remember asking a local NGO director how it was that there were so many NGOs, yet in every direction, it seemed that the challenges were still there. I went to graduate school, hoping to begin to answer that question through research in India, inspired by my earlier experience studying in Delhi. However, once I got back to Charlottesville and began a small project in a local clinic for low-income people, it seemed that perhaps what was happening outside of the NGO walls might give a better answer. It wasn’t just that NGO approaches to social problems needed to be understood—it’s that we need to understand how communities cope and have resilience. It’s with this hope that I begin my research—aspiring to do research that will build on the strength of communities, using anthropology as a tool.