ES: Can you tell me how the ACE course, Anthropology of Health and Illness, came to be and why you decided to include ACE projects?
PFS: I started teaching this course when I came to Carleton in 1993, but it did not start to have ACE projects until early 2000 when Carleton graduate, Angie Koch ‘02, who had taken my class while at Carleton, asked if I had any students who could help her with the work at the then fledgling organization HealthFinders Collaborative that she started while working on her masters in Public Health. We started having the ACE component of the course be just a voluntary thing, and there were between two and four students per year who could choose to do an ACE project with HealthFinders. At first, I was thinking this would be something interesting and important for students, and it would show an application to what they’re learning. Initially, some students were really into it, and many others were very shy of it – they wanted to do traditional papers. Then, interest started expanding from the students and other local organizations, such as Growing Up Healthy. Students started connecting their volunteer activities to ACE projects, and there was, at one time, a high interest from students speaking the languages of HealthFinder clinic clients doing work with interpretation. There were some interesting things about interpretation and body language in clinical settings.
ES: What motivates students to do more applied or community-based work?
PFS: First, they think of field work as interviewing and not participant observation, being there, you know, having presence. Sometimes their ambitions outpaced their skills, particularly since it’s not a methods course, it’s a medical anthropology course. I think students wanted to apply things. They were eager to get into the community. I think they were curious about Northfield. Most of them are not from Northfield, or not necessarily even from Minnesota. I think there’s also the urge to do good in the world and not have their academic learning be just theoretical. There are a few who had motivations that were more pre-professional. “I want to go into public health”, or particularly, “I want to become a doctor, and this is going to help me in my med school applications”. I think different things were primary for different students. I always had the regular library research project as an option, but more recently, ACE projects are the default, and students had to have a good reason if they wanted to do an individual paper. For example, one student wanted to write and reflect a little bit more academically on a report that he had made, based on a summer internship about adverse childhood experiences and later health indicators.
ES: As the course developed and changed, were there any pivot points for you where you made intentional decisions around how you were thinking about the course?
PFS: I wanted to be responsive to student choice, and I wanted to be responsive to community needs, and I always created the projects in collaboration with a community partner. I didn’t like some of the discourse about service learning that seemed like the community is your fishbowl to be used and studied. I liked models that were much more collaborative. One thing I changed is to have new projects with different partners every year. I then started to incorporate at least some literature that was relevant to the projects into what we did in the syllabus, along with additional recommended but optional readings, so they would be sitting there for people working on the projects. The syllabus still has pretty much the same structure of the book ends of life, birth and death, and what’s in between – starting with the intimate and going out towards a more social structural approach, in other words things intimate, then social interaction, community level, and then big, outside level. Another thing that has changed is that I do more front-end content on the ethics of engaged medical anthropology than I used to do. I also started a collaboration with Debby Walser-Kuntz, Herman and Gertrude Mosier Stark Professor of Biology and the Natural Sciences, and her Immunology ACE course to co-lead the annual public health luncheon.
ES: You talked about modeling ethical engagement for this class. What does that look like in practice?
PFS: I do tell the students that these projects were made in collaboration with the community partners, and I spent a term before we started working on this. I bring the community partners in. I emphasize that they should be listening to the community partners. I’ve noticed that they need a lot of nudges to understand that not everyone is on Carleton’s timeline, and that professional people have lots of other things to do than to take care of Carleton students. That seems to be getting better, partly because I put these structures into play, like having a timeline, and now always having an ACE TA.
You can’t just kind of make a project and then expect it to run. We do some readings about ethics at the beginning. I remind people to get in touch with their community partners and to pay attention to what the community partner wants. Another thing that I added over time is that, in addition to their final papers and the formal presentation with the community partners present, the students should think about whether there’s something that their partners might want. It could be an executive summary, it could be a stack of slides. Usually, there’s something, and now that’s incorporated into the project description. At these presentations, it’s often the community partners who ask the most and best questions. But I also prompt students beforehand about their responsibilities as listeners to their peers: pay attention, take notes, ask questions. I prime them by telling them what their responsibilities are as an audience.
ES: Do you feel like teaching this course has influenced your teaching or scholarship over time?
PFS: I’ve always been kind of detail-oriented, but it’s making me more deliberate in understanding things that students need, things that they understand or don’t understand, trying to make more connections to the world out there, or thinking more creatively about how to do that. I think it’s expanded my mind, I think it’s changed me as a person. It’s been extremely enriching for me.
in terms of my research. One was a collaboration about language revitalization in Cameroon, and it had to do with publishing a book in the local language to which I had contributed, and my Carleton Public Works grant helped the organizer-editor in Cameroon. There is an organization similar to Minnesota’s Center for Victims of Torture in Berlin, where I conducted interviews when I was doing my initial research on migrant women. I am interested in talking to Syrian refugees about housing and mental health. With research that I’ve been doing with migrant women, I think about issues of representation and uplifting or showing the rest of the world the good things that they do, and how they kind of struggle through hardship to do good things. My most recent article, which just came out last week, is about migrant mothers’ expertise in how different generations engage about parenting, social class mobility, and getting along in a new place. There isn’t that much I can give directly to my interlocutors, so sometimes I do things indirectly, such as pro bono work being an expert witness for asylum cases.
ES: Can you talk about what is challenging about teaching a course like this?
PFS: It’s like teaching two courses at once. It requires a lot of prep. And it’s new prep every year, even though it’s an old course. I can’t just take the syllabus from last year and change the dates and be done. That goes for the readings in the course as well as developing the ACE projects with partners. It would be really hard to do without your (CCCE) support. How would I know about all these community partners? Also, figuring out what students can do when they want to be doing field work that they don’t know how to do, figuring out what they can do so that they are useful and not a burden to the community partner. I haven’t completely solved that, and it’s probably not completely solvable either.
ES: What is the gap? Can you say more about that?
PFS: I think it’s a few things. The 10-week term is part of it, and also that I don’t have space to teach methods because it’s a medical anthropology class. Students are eager. They have a hunger to be involved in the community. Sometimes it’s kind of naive eagerness, not realizing what it takes to be a participant observer. For example, what does it take to do a good interview? What does it take to get good information without just using people or intruding into their private sphere? Or, dealing with difficult issues and realizing that you’re the interviewer or you’re the researcher, and you can go away and have your own life, and those people still have to deal with those difficult issues that you’ve just stirred up by talking with them about their struggles. Sometimes people think, Oh, if I talk with them about that, it’s going to be harmful, because it’s going to stir things up. And sometimes it’s true, but sometimes it’s “Oh, someone is listening”, and that listening and acknowledgement are a good thing, in a sense. But if someone listens and only listens once and then goes away, that can feel odd. I don’t know how to bridge such gaps, and I don’t think I can bridge them for the students. They have to learn themselves and think through some of the things themselves as well.
ES: Do you have prerequisites for this course?
PFS: I have prerequisites with which I am flexible. Any 200-level course in SOAN has the recommended prerequisite of taking one of our two intro courses. It can be an intro course or just another Sociology/Anthropology course. Sometimes when students write to me and don’t have the prerequisite, I’ll ask them if they have had courses in social history, religion, or other social sciences. I ask them what kind of volunteer work they have done already. I want to see if they have a sense of dealing with differences and reflecting on differences, and thinking in more social scientific ways.
ES: What advice do you have for faculty teaching ACE courses?
PFS:
- Spend time before the course starts with the community partners, and develop things with them. It’s not such a good thing to run by the seat of your pants, because community partners and students, and faculty all have different needs and different kinds of tempos.
- You need to meet with the students and have an ACE Teaching Assistant who can also meet with the students about their ACE projects.
- Work with the CCCE (Emily Seru has a lot of wisdom.)
- Work to integrate the ACE work into the whole course and be intentional about how the course concepts apply to the ACE project work. How is this experience for the students going to enhance a particular concept or set of concepts that you’re trying to get across in the course? How will the students be able to use those concepts?
ES: What are some of the benefits of teaching an ACE course?
PFS: It is kind of fun. You meet fantastic people. I experience immense gratitude sometimes from partners and students, and that makes me think that it’s worthwhile. It makes you feel like you can have a different kind of impact. Incorporating serious ACE projects into a class (like my term-long projects) in no way takes away from the intellectual merit or discussion of a wide range of topics paired with conceptual/theoretical thinking and learning for the students. Some people might think or fear that there is a trade-off (with the assumption that applied work requires “theory-lite”, but when structured carefully, there is more enhancement than trade-off.
Example ACE projects from 2016 – 2025
Off Campus Community Partner Projects:
- HOPE Center: Political and Economic Impacts on Intimate Partner Violence and Support Services
- Health Community Initiative: Community Perceptions of Harm Reduction Responses
- Koom Recovery: Building Culturally Responsive Recovery Programming
- Northfield Area Family YMCA: Addressing Chronicity and Restoring Agency though the Rock Solid Exercise Program
- Owatonna Hospital Post Natal Care
- HOPE Center: Raising Awareness for First Responders about Signs of Strangulation from Intimate Partner Violence
- Growing Up Healthy: Impacting Health Equity through Early Education and Childcare
- Rural Immigration Network “Recipes for Action” and “Research Briefs”
- HealthFinders Mental Health Inquiry
- HealthFinders Pura Vida Life Histories
- Community Action Center: The Impacts of Physical Space and Social Relationship Building
- Community Action Center: Addiction, Recovery, and Solidarity in Social Services
- Understanding and Mitigating Families’ Barriers to Health-Promoting Food and Exercise: Healthy Communities Initiative and Healthy Ways at Greenvale Community School
- Northfield Union of Youth: Lived Barriers to Accessing Housing and Mental Health Care for Youth
On Campus Community Partner Projects:
- Ethiopian Cookstove, Nutrition, and Indoor Air Pollution
- Carleton College Public Health Lunch Project: Polio Eradication or Reemergence? From Plasma Cells to Politics (with BIOL 310)
- Carleton College Public Health Lunch Project: Pandemic and Infodemic—COVID (Mis)Information and Communities (with BIOL 310)
- Carleton College Public Health Lunch Project: Diabetes—Intersections of Social Determinants and Immunology (with BIOL 310)
- Carleton College Public Health Lunch: Lessons Learned from Epidemics Past and Present—Ebola (with BIOL 310)
- Carleton College Public Health Lunch: Focus on Zika in Collaboration with BIOL 310
- Carleton College Public Health Lunch: Focus on Vaccines, in Collaboration with BIOL 310
- Office of Health Promotion Diving Deeper into Stress
- Office of Health Promotion: Intersections of Health, Well-being and Culture
- Office of Health Promotion Mental Well-Being
- Green Dot Bystander Intervention Program
- Food Recovery Network Food Access