John doering-white, program co-chair

John Doering-White, Ph.D., Assistant Professor

College of Social Work & Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina

John Doering-White is an anthropologist and social work scholar interested in the intersections of migration and humanitarianism. Since 2014, his ethnographic research has focused on grassroots migrant shelters in Mexico that assist people migrating through the country, primarily from Central America. More recently, his work has focused on how climate-related displacement is made visible and obscured in humanitarian spaces. He is an Assistant Professor in the College of Social Work and the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD from the Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. 

Katie Gibson, program co-chair

Katie Gibson, Ph.D., Post-doctoral Research Associate & Part-time Lecturer

Department of Anthropology & Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy & Practice, University of Chicago

My research draws from sociocultural anthropology, organizational sociology, and science and technology studies to examine mental health interventions in the American child welfare system. Since 2017, my ethnographic work has documented how psychotropic drugs are overseen and monitored in Illinois’s foster care system. As an ethnographer, teacher, and former ward of the state, I am driven to deepen our understanding of the ethical complexities and political stakes of the work performed by social workers and other professionals in American youth-serving systems.

Research Interests: Accountability, Anthropology of Policy, Anthropology of the US, Child Welfare Policy, Family Abolition, Mental Health Policy

Hannah Obertino norwood, program co-chair

Hannah Obertino Norwood, MA, PhD Candidate

Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, University of Chicago

Hannah Obertino Norwood’s research brings together sociocultural anthropology, social work, and science and technology studies to examine the affective and political dimensions of counting and the relationship between immigrants and the US state. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of the mobilization to avert an undercount in the 2020 Census in Chicago and centers the work of the many professional actors outside of the Census Bureau engaged in enumeration. As a scholar and teacher, she is interested in engaging US institutions and social work settings as sites of politics and policymaking and in the intersections of social work and ethnographic method.

Research Interests: Anthropology of the US, Immigration Policy, Frontline Professionals, the US Census, Surveillance and Mistrust, American Inequality

sanoop valappanandi, program co-chair

Sanoop Valappanandi, MA, PhD Student

College of Social Work, Florida State University

Sanoop Valappanandi is from the Southern part of India and earned his degree in social work from the University of Calicut and a master's degree in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, he worked for nearly six years in a leading environmental organization on various issues related to climate change resilience, environmental justice, natural resource governance, and rural livelihoods. He also worked as a research assistant for one year in Kerala, India, where he was involved in an ethnographic research project focusing on environmental justice movements. His research focuses on environmental justice. Particularly, his research focuses on the social impact of climate change on the well-being of marginalized and vulnerable populations in South Asia.

Research Interests: Environmental justice, community organizing, environmental social work.