Chloe affiliation: Chloe Center Postdoctoral Fellow 2023–2025
Tali Ziv’s ongoing research at the Chloe Center focuses on dynamics of care in addressing incarceration and decarceration.
About the research
When I entered my anthropology program, I initially felt I was done with public health. I immersed myself in political anthropology and postcolonial studies, partly due to previous work in Latin America. I was struck by how analyses of cities in the United States, and the country itself more broadly, seemed isolated from the discourse and literature of the Global South. I became deeply interested in why understandings of Black communities in the United States, as well as issues of race and racialization more broadly, were approached so differently from those in the Global South. This was the first phase of my thinking in the program.
Historical inequality
As I began to explore Black-owned drug treatment providers in Philadelphia, these tools were actually invaluable. This allowed me to explore the historical life of inequality as it continues to live on in the present. Often, we address acute public health crises or issues like addiction in isolation, without considering their historical roots. Attuned to these roots, I began to rethink historical inequality and its ongoing effects, but also the relationship between community-based public health programs, drug treatment centers, and other kind of social services and the state.
I looked at how local city governments have been privatized and deregulated, changes that occurred in many cities across the Global South at the turn of the 21st century. Whereas the U.S. state is often considered a gargantuan, well-funded, and coherent entity that has the power to conduct counterinsurgencies and build empire abroad, at the county level, I found that especially in a really unequal city like Philadelphia, where the government itself is really poor, and it’s not getting much federal support, the state is actually quite anemic.
These questions of deregulation, punitive surveillance, but also structural dependency on informal arrangements in racialized communities, depending on upwardly mobile entrepreneurs to take care of and really govern their own, are questions that are reminiscent of “development” contexts abroad. That’s how my work intersects with the Chloe Center’s concerns, both thinking about the historical life of racialized inequality but also conceptualizing a deeper understanding of repair that can reckon with that inequality by actively considering whose stories of inequality and futurity do we listen to. Simultaneously, it brings a global attention to the United States and to the U.S. city to not only conceptualize Black populations in a critical diasporic mode but also to provincialize and de-exceptionalize the United States and Global North in general. This approach aligns with the frameworks and tools the Chloe Center employs.