Clare Casey

My fieldwork follows teens and young adults as they navigate state-funded nonprofit
healthcare, housing, and social service systems in two major urban centers in the
United States. I take seriously these clients’ own understandings of the financially
networked systems they find themselves caught up in. My book project draws on this
research and toggles between the perspectives of providers-- doctors, caseworkers,
nonprofit executives, agency officials -- and the clients who feel trapped in nonprofit
systems. This project pays attention to progressive ideologies of community and their
collision with neoliberal cost-cutting at the point of service delivery. I argue that across
these systems, community is imposed on clients who don’t have the power to refuse it.

A second project is a grant-funded hospital-based study of transgender and nonbinary
youth, their parents, and providers, across two different kinds of clinics offering
transgender care. Drawing from transgender studies, this project seeks to show the
ways in which transgender is not monolithic particularly when we account for different
racialized histories and relationships to public health.

In my introductory lecture course, I teach foundational works of social theory and
anthropology and bring the lenses of witchcraft, accusation, gossip, and conspiracy
theory to bear on contemporary debates.