Research

Structural Vulnerability in Biological and Medical Anthropology (with Katherine Miller Wolf and Allysha Winburn)

We’re an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists at UWF (forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and medical anthropology) examining the embodiment of social marginalization as reflected in skeletal and dental biomarkers. This work is currently (2022-23) funded by a Wenner-Gren Post-PhD grant (Winburn, PI, Miller Wolf and Marten, Co-PIs), and research is on-going alongside our team of graduate students at UWF’s Biocultural Research Lab. Our commentary introducing the concept of a ‘structural vulnerability profile’ was published in 2022 in Forensic Sciences International: Synergy.

This collaboration was inspired in part by a book chapter we wrote with some of our grad students applying theories from medical anthropology and social epidemiology to forensic anthropological analysis, published in the edited volume The Marginalized in Death (Byrnes and Sandoval-Cervantes, eds).

This work also inspired a somewhat tangential (but fun!) analysis of “what makes a ‘good’ forensic anthropologist” using the ethnographic research method of cultural consensus analysis. This was published in September 2023 in American Anthropologist.

Infant and Maternal Health in Pensacola, Florida (with the Escambia County Healthy Start Coalition)

For this collaborative project, my research collaborators and I are researching two things. First, we are examining the National Center for Fatality Review & Prevention’s Fetal and Infant Mortality Review data for the state of Florida, looking at patterns in the contexts of infants’ sleep-related deaths, particularly the social and structural determinants. Second, we’re interested in researching patterns in bias and “noise” in medical examiners’ official cause of death reports. Data analysis and writing for these research foci are ongoing.

HIV+ Women, Donor Aid Volatility and Health Care Sustainability in Tanzania

This project was my dissertation work in rural Tanzania, focusing on the experiences of HIV+ women as they navigate a rural, mission-funded hospital’s Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV program amidst donor scale-down and volatility in global health policy. Publications from this research have appeared in Medical Anthropology, Social Science & Medicine, Global Public Health (see Marten 2017 and Marten 2022), and in the open-access book Anthropologies of Global Maternal & Reproductive Health (Wallace, Storeng & MacDonald, eds).