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.