Research Description
Dr. Robbins's research is motivated by a concern for how some older people become valued and socially included, while others are devalued and socially excluded. As an anthropologist, she seeks explanations for these moral processes in the links between personal experience, personal and discursive imaginations, and transformations in political economy. In her first ethnographic project she sought to answer these questions through ethnographic research in Poland, a place where radical sociocultural and political-economic transformations have occurred in the lifetime of the oldest generations. Current ethnographic research investigates related issues of social inclusion and exclusion among older adults in the post-industrial urban United States.
Dr. Robbins's first book, Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood was published in December 2020 with Rutgers University Press. An ethnographic and historical account of the moral logics that make full personhood in old age contingent on health, this study draws on almost two years of fieldwork in diverse institutional sites in Wrocław and Poznań, Poland. She draws on theoretical perspectives from studies of kinship, postsocialism, and memory to create explanatory links across temporal and geographic scales.
In her fieldsite of the urban post-industrial US, Dr. Robbins is currently writing up data from two related ethnographic projects:
1) A study entitled "Cultivating Life in a Revitalizing City: Understanding Social Relations and Health through an Ethnographic Study of Gardening among Older African Americans in Detroit" brings together in one analytic lens the phenomena of aging societies and urban change by studying a social movement in which these concerns unite: urban gardening. This project explores the links between urban change, personal and community health across the life course, and connections to land and environment.
2) A study entitled "Older Adults' Experiences and Understandings of the Flint Water Crisis," as Co-PI together with Dr. Tam Perry (Co-PI, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, WSU) explores how exposure to contaminated water shapes physical, mental, and social wellbeing of older adults. This project explores shifting notions of trust, responsibility, and morality at stake in the Flint water crisis through an ethnographic focus on older adults, a population that can be overlooked in humanitarian crises.
Dr. Robbins has an ongoing research project on the (pre)/(post)socialist histories of the sciences of aging in Poland, in which she seeks to understand how the fields of gerontology, geriatrics, andragogika and pedagogy, and social work were shaped by sociocultural and political-economic transformations in central Europe. She is also developing two new projects: 1) on gardening and memory among older African Americans with dementia, as a way of bridging cognitive and social scientific understandings of memory, and 2) on reminiscence therapy among people with dementia, as a way of understanding the intimate politics of memory in later life. Other research interests include aging and memory in the Polish-American community in Michigan, and memory and palliative and hospice care.
I am actively recruiting MA and PhD students in sociocultural and medical anthropology. Please contact the department for more information about our graduate programs, or email me directly before applying.