Alexandra Brewis Slade

Professor
Associate Director, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Ph.D., Biological Anthropology, University of Arizona

SHESC Themes: Biological, Social and Cultural Dimensions of Human Health; Societies and their Natural Environments

Field Specializations: Biocultural Anthropology; Demographics; Human Adaptation; Human Reproduction; Medical Anthropology; Nutrition, Growth and Development

Regional Foci: Mesoamerica, Oceania, North America, International

Contact: Alexandra Brewis Slade, SHESC 206

Personal Web Page

South Phoenix Collaborative 

Curriculum Vitae

ASU Directory Profile

Research:
Alexandra Brewis Slade's research is focused in the area of bio-cultural anthropology, exploring the dynamic interplay of biology, culture and ecology in the production of human health and demographic outcomes. Particularly, she is interested in the fundamental question of how culture shapes the biological expressions of health and disease. Currently, she is especially focused on the “problem” of obesity and is collecting data in a number of countries to consider how cultural knowledge and social arrangements might be linked to obesity risk in an increasingly obesogenic world. She is also considering how negative views of big bodies are distributed globally, and if they might be becoming more or less powerful and prevalent as big bodies become the norm. This is an important issue because the scientific evidence shows that most of the costs of being obese to the individual are actually in the social rather than biological domain (e.g., stigma, social rejection, depression).

Brewis integrates a lot of fieldwork into her research and encourages her students to do the same because she finds it a powerful way to generate new knowledge and think through complex problems in a more holistic and human way. Over the years, she has done field research in both the Pacific and the Americas, including Mexico, the U.S., Samoa, Kiribati and elsewhere in Micronesia and New Zealand. She also manages the Culture, Ecology and Health Laboratory at ASU, in which she works with graduate and undergraduate students on a range of health-related projects.

Much of Brewis Slade’s current fieldwork is focused locally in urban South Phoenix, a community near the ASU Downtown campus that is comprised of predominantly migrant, lower-income and Latino/a neighborhoods. She is working with community partners and an interdisciplinary team of researchers (including Chris Boone, Amber Wutich and Seline Szkupinski Quiroga) to better understand how cultural norms and social networks interact to shape disease risk (including but not only obesity risk and food security) at the household and neighborhood level in such resource-short urban settings, and how this knowledge might in turn be leveraged to shape more healthful and just local policies and practices for those communities.

Since she is ultimately interested in explaining how and why health varies within and across groups based on understanding how culture and biology play off each other, over the years her research has addressed a number of different diseases and conditions, such as infertility, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, under- and over-nutrition, behavioral disorders (such as ADHD) and depression. She is also very interested in the question of how we can best assess culture as an empirical phenomenon, especially in health and environmental research, where the stakes for getting this right are fairly high. This question is a central concern of the Late Lessons from Early History project that she is working on with collaborators in the school between now and 2013. The project team is using the South Phoenix project to test and highlight some newer approaches for describing cultural variation and their links to human biology in ways that allow results to be generalized better and accommodate more complicated and dynamic settings.  

Research Projects:
Antibiotic Therapy from Both Sides of the Counter and Both Sides of the Border 
Culture, Health and Environment in Urban South Phoenix 
Small World/Big Bodies  
Social Networks, Wellbeing and Responses to Shifts in Immigration Policy and Practice 
The South Phoenix Collaborative: Leveraging Culture & History to Support Healthy, Resilient and Just Communities
 

Teaching:
Brewis Slade's courses typically coalesce in the areas of her own training and research interests: her Ph.D. was in biological anthropology with a medical anthropology minor; her post-doc was in demography; and she is also active in the fields of nutritional anthropology and human biology. This includes courses in urban and environmental health; food and culture; and medical anthropology. Other courses she greatly enjoys include grant writing and research design; ethnographic methods; and professional development (basically, the things she wishes she'd been taught more of in graduate school). Brewis Slade tries to focus on teaching students how to learn rather than what to learn and challenges herself to make instruction as meaningful, memorable and relevant as possible, so students will really want to be involved in their own education. She directs the Ph.D. program in Social Science & Health and has been centrally involved in developing the school’s new B.A. in Global Health, the first such major offered anywhere. Currently she is working on plans for a new Ph.D. and M.A. in Global Health that will launch in 2010.

Experience has also made Brewis Slade a convert to the idea that the best teaching doesn't always take place in the classroom or using a standard lecture-style delivery. Particularly, she has found that actively managed field, study abroad and research activities—getting students outside their regular comfort zone and into a new, stimulating and challenging environment—can be the best ways to promote truly real and lifelong learning. Currently, she manages a suite of study abroad programs in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia and London exploring transdisciplinary themes related to global health, such as urban and environmental health and cross-cultural approaches to healing. Over the years she has also developed and directed interdisciplinary programs in other countries, such as Belize, and has taught on study abroad in many other countries.

Potential graduate students interested in working with Brewis Slade in any of these or related areas, or undergraduates looking to get involved in research, are encouraged to contact her. At this time she is encouraging students to consider working on issues related to child or household nutrition and/or health in low-income urban Phoenix, where the South Phoenix collaborative provides a wonderful, supportive, interesting and relevant setting for dissertation work; in tropical South America or Mexico, where ASU also has a fabulous infrastructure to support students; or in Fiji, Australia, London or New Zealand, where she regularly runs study abroad programs. Of course, she understands that students like to do their own thing and she also has students working on projects in Alaska, Africa, elsewhere in Arizona and beyond on a whole range of bio-cultural topics related to health and population. However, she is especially interested in recruiting graduate students who want to develop dissertation projects related to either her obesity research or the The South Phoenix Collaborative.

Select Publications:
Brewis, A. (in press). Culture and obesity. Book under contract with Rutgers University Press.

Brewis, A. & Lee, S. (in press). Children's work, earning, and nutrition in urban Mexican shantytowns. American Journal of Human Biology.

Hadley, C., Brewis, A. & Pike, I. (in press). Does less autonomy erode women's health? Yes. No. Maybe. American Journal of Human Biology.

Brewis, A. & Meyer, M. (2007). Child obesity in global perspective: Emergent risks related to social status, urbanism, and poverty. In R. K. Flamembaum (ed.), Global dimensions of childhood obesity (pp. 51-68). Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Brewis, A. & Gartin, M. (2006). Biocultural construction of obesogenic ecologies of childhood: Parent-feeding versus child-eating strategies. American Journal of Human Biology, 18, 203-213.

Brewis, A. & Meyer, M. (2005). Demographic evidence that human ovulation is undetectable (at least in pair bonds). Current Anthropology, 46(3), 465-71.

Brewis, A & Meyer, M. (2005). Marital coitus across the life course. Journal of Biosocial Science, 37(4), 499-518.

Brewis, A. (2003). Biocultural aspects of obesity in young Mexican schoolchildren. American Journal of Human Biology, 15, 446-60.

Brewis, A., Schmidt, K. & Meyer, M. (2000). ADHD-type behavior and harmful dysfunction in childhood: a cross-cultural model. American Anthropologist, 102(4), 823-28.

Brewis, A. (1999). Accuracy of attractive body judgment. Current Anthropology, 40, 548-53.

Brewis, A., Laycock, J. & Huntsman, J. (1996). Birth non-seasonality on the Pacific equator. Current Anthropology, 37(5), 842-51.