Impossible Scenarios - Lives at the Intersection of Poverty and Late CapitalismVishal Khanna
Between 1997 and 1998, the public health ethnographer, Robert Aronson, conducted a series of interviews with twelve men in Baltimore, Maryland. These men were poor, were connected to the drug trafficking industry and were fathers of young children. The interviews tell the stories of these men, these souls at the frontlines of the health fiasco that is generational poverty in America. This internship project starts with Aronson’s completed interviews and finishes with a lengthy narrative that frames these men’s life stories within the context of the discipline of public health and the community in which they live and struggle. Through these life stories, we propose to find the trajectory where poverty takes people, those particular life paths, and pose the following question: if poverty, that illness that has since birth defined these men’s lives, were taken away, how would their trajectories change? How can we help these men and the next generation of young men escape the impossible scenarios they’ve been born into?
Impossible Scenarios - Lives at the Intersection of Poverty and Late CapitalismVishal Khanna
Between 1997 and 1998, the public health ethnographer, Robert Aronson, conducted a series of interviews with twelve men in Baltimore, Maryland. These men were poor, were connected to the drug trafficking industry and were fathers of young children. The interviews tell the stories of these men, these souls at the frontlines of the health fiasco that is generational poverty in America. This internship project starts with Aronson’s completed interviews and finishes with a lengthy narrative that frames these men’s life stories within the context of the discipline of public health and the community in which they live and struggle. Through these life stories, we propose to find the trajectory where poverty takes people, those particular life paths, and pose the following question: if poverty, that illness that has since birth defined these men’s lives, were taken away, how would their trajectories change? How can we help these men and the next generation of young men escape the impossible scenarios they’ve been born into?