When the pandemic forced us away from school in the Spring of 2020, I questioned how the scope of this project would change. As the world battled for supplies of toilet paper, car lines of 1000s waited at food banks, and PPE supplies diminished, I began to reconsider whether investigating structural violence in Kensington, specifically around the opioid epidemic, was the ethical thing to do at a time like this. The COVID19 obscured my perception of its prominent stance in our consciousness: it seemed to me, at this time, other subjects didn’t “matter” as much or might not be relevant in investigating. Would Philadelphia residents even want to collaborate with me on a topic such as this, when they are already overwhelmed and overburdened by a pandemic that has caused a x amount increase in unemployment and x deaths.
However, from my position at my home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, safely watching the pandemic unfold in the areas around me, I saw patterns emerging that tied to my research interest of structural violence. For instance, data visualizations showing the proportions of cases and deaths by state and county started to fill my media screens. These maps highlighted differences that were “emerging,” which indirectly indicated that they were not previously there before. Many visualizations, such as this one, took these visualized differences and added layers of context, citing how inequitable structures, such as environmental contamination, access to healthy food or access to healthcare, could inform county by county differences in COVID19 cases. In this sense, the COVID19 pandemic has revitalized this idea that “place matters” in terms of individual and population level health. However, I began to wonder why this idea of “place matters” only received broad scale attention and social acknowledgement when the health obstacle, COVID19, is impacting the entire population of the United States and the world. Why do health problems, such as the heroin and opioid epidemic, not get this same contextualization and social acknowledgement of the significance of place?
These questions affirmed to me that, even in the midst of a pandemic, my research questions were relevant; arguably, even more relevant than they were in the past. Kensington, Philadelphia has been portrayed in the media in articles such as this one as the geographic center of the United State’s opioid epidemic for many years. However, unlike Nemeth & Rowan’s COVID19 article, no context is added to the maps and images produced from drug activity in this area; the opioid epidemic is portrayed as a geographically localized phenomenon in which criminalization measures have historically been utilized as a mechanism of control. Many projects, such as Jeffrey Stockbridge’s Kensington Blues portraiture blog, aim to humanize the residents of Kensington by sharing their personal experiences and narratives, showing that they are interwoven with the obstacles of drug abuse but not defined solely by it. However, many of these re-humanization projects are limited in the sense that they do not connect the present day narratives of those in Kensington to the historical structures and processes that cause individuals to be located in a specific geographic place, and therefore experience the effects of “place matters” on health. In light of the COVID19 pandemic, I am questioning why the idea of “place matters” is relevant now, and not beforehand in the emergence of the opioid epidemic? Is it because the one epidemic affects us all while the other is seen as geographically isolated, “brought on” by a specific population, and lastly is seen as “not our problem” in a broad scale, societal sense?
This thesis aims to connect the methodology of anthropology with data visualization in order to show that there is more to ethnographic methods than storytelling; the COVID19 pandemic has shown us that visualizing context by showing it in a visual, and therefore accessible form, that some geographic areas and the populations that reside within them are more at risk of contracting the virus. By including multiple visualizations that show other factors that contribute to an individual or population’s place based health, health is contextualized by the antecedent structures that contributed to the life narratives of the residents.
Works Cited:
Daily. “A Dark Corner of America: Photographs Show Philadelphia’s Seedy, Drug-Fueled Underbelly and Its Inhabitants’ Struggle to Survive.” Mail Online, May 6, 2012. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2140221/A-dark-corner-America-Photographs-seedy-drug-fueled-underbelly-Philadelphia.html.
Stockbridge, Jeffery. “Archives.” KENSINGTON BLUES, August 27, 2011. https://kensingtonblues.com/archives/.
Németh, Jeremy, and Sarah Rowan. “Is Your Neighborhood Raising Your Coronavirus Risk? Redlining Decades Ago Set Communities up for Greater Danger.” The Conversation. Accessed June 16, 2020. http://theconversation.com/is-your-neighborhood-raising-your-coronavirus-risk-redlining-decades-ago-set-communities-up-for-greater-danger-138256.