2023-24 Stapleton Recipients

Through the physician and patient network gained from working as a Clinical Research Assistant for the Neurology Department at Georgetown Medstar, Dhruvi will be interviewing patients suffering from neuromuscular disorders. Through these interviews, he will be exploring how people’s identities change over the course of chronic neurological disorder as well as how to better align physician-patient goals in these circumstances. He seeks to understand how the socio-cultural backgrounds unique to each patient affects their health seeking behavior and their specific relationship and interaction with the American healthcare setting. In approaching such a project from an ethnographic and anthropological perspective, Dhruvi hopes to create a non-clinical space where patients can share their experiences.  

Lisette conducted fieldwork on harm reduction in North Texas. Her goal for this phase of the project was interrogating people’s subjective understanding and experience with harm reduction as a practice and philosophy.

Pietro traveled to Tokyo, Japan in the summer of 2023 to pursue a ten-week research project centered around an ethnographic analysis of the rich, multifaceted soundscapes of urban Japan and on the sonic culture of “deep listening” at jazz kissa, underground noise music shows, and traditional Japanese gardens. He investigated these cultural phenomena primarily through field recording, creating a sonic ethnography to document his findings alongside a traditional written ethnography.