Professor Elizabeth Carpenter-Song speaks on poverty and homelessness in the Upper Valley. This is a hybrid program.  Join us in person in the Mayer Room, Howe Library, or online via Zoom.  Registration is only required for the Zoom link; you can register here.  

Families on the Edge is an portrait of families in the Upper Valley who are often undercut by the very systems that are set up to help them. In this book, author and medical anthropologist Elizabeth Carpenter-Song draws on a decade of ethnographic research to chart the struggles of a cohort of families she met in a Vermont family shelter in 2009, as they contend with housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance use. Few other works have attempted to take such a long-term view of how vulnerability to homelessness unfolds over time or to engage so fully with existing scholarship in the fields of anthropology and health services.

Carpenter-Song's book identifies how specific aspects of rural New England—including scarce affordable housing stock, extremely limited transportation, and cultural expectations of self-reliance—come together to thwart opportunities for families despite their continual striving to “make it” in this environment. Carpenter-Song shines a light on the many high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail and offers a way forward for clinicians, health researchers, and policymakers seeking practical solutions.

Elizabeth Carpenter-Song is currently a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Her work has been published in journals ranging from Ethos to Psychiatric Services to Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless. Her scholarship is grounded in experience-based and meaning-centered approaches in medical and psychological anthropology, which aim to unite engagement with lived experiences of distress with attention to how structural forces produce and exacerbate suffering. Her research in the anthropology of mental health spans three primary areas: (1) examining lived experiences of illness, recovery, and health services; (2) examining the culture of U.S. psychiatry; and (3) translating anthropological concepts and methods to mental health research and practice.