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University
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Department of Anthropology
211 Lafferty Hall
Lexington, KY 40506
Phone: 859-257-2710
Fax: 859-323-1959
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 |
Deborah
L. Crooks, Ph.D. Associate Professor |
Research Statement:
As a nutritional and medical anthropologist who works from a biocultural perspective, my interests focus on understanding how humans engage and negotiate their environments to produce well-being. I am particularly interested in community and household strategies to produce adequate nutrition and health, and the circumstances that might facilitate or constrain success. I combine theory and methods from biological, nutritional and medical anthropology to address these issues, and my data are both quantitative and qualitative. For example, I might measure children and collect data on food consumption and/or days ill, but I would also observe and discuss with research participants the complex interactions among people and their ecological, social and cultural environments as they go about their daily lives.
My past research focused on the relationship among child growth and school achievement in a Mayan community in Belize; and children's food consumption patterns as they related to nutritional status and possible future health in a rural community in eastern Kentucky. In both of these projects, I attempted to understand nutrition and health in context of larger political/economic processes. In my most recent project, I worked with Filipino colleagues to examine changes in child growth and nutritional status in a community undergoing rapid social and economic change as it moved from a more subsistence-based fishing economy to a more market-oriented fishing economy in the space of ten years. We are currently analyzing those data.
Currently, I am collaborating with colleagues at the University of Kentucky on two health-related projects. The first project, with Dr. Sharon Barton from the College of Nursing as P.I. and funded by the National Institutes of Health, focuses on infant feeding in eastern Kentucky communities. The second project is a curriculum project in the UK College of Medicine, also funded by the NIH, with Dr. William Elder, Department of Family Medicine as P.I. Thepurpose of this project is to develop and implement a curriculum model to provide future doctors with information on complementary and alternative medicine so they will be better able to work with patients who utilize multiple health modalities in their health care strategies.
Research Interests:
Nutritional, medical, biocultural anthropology; political-economy of child growth and nutritional status; food and nutrition security; international health and nutrition; medical pluralism, complementary and alternative medicine; biocultural theory and methods.
Courses taught:
ANT 230 Introduction
to Biological Anthropology
ANT 333 Contemporary Human Variation
ANT 440 Anthropological Perspectives on Child Growth and Development
ANT 603 Human Biology in Context of Sociocultural Change
ANT 607 Food-Related Behaviors
ANT 646 International Health: People, Institutions and Change
ANT 774 Malnutrition and Food Security in a Changing World
Selected Publications:
Crooks, Deborah L. (2003) Trading nutrition for education: Nutritional status and the sale of snack foods in an eastern Kentucky school. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17:182-199.
Crooks, Deborah L. (2000) Food consumption, activity and overweight among elementary school children an Appalachian Kentucky community. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 112:159-170.
Crooks, Deborah L. (1999) Child growth and nutritional status in a high poverty community in eastern Kentucky. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 109:129-143.
Crooks, Deborah L. (1998) Poverty and nutrition in eastern Kentucky: The political-economy of childhood growth. In Alan H. Goodman and Thomas L. Leatherman (eds): Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 339-355.
Crooks, Deborah L. (1997) Biocultural factors in school achievement for Mopan children in Belize. American Anthropologist 99:586-602.
Crooks, Deborah L. (1995) American children at risk: Poverty and its consequences for growth, health and school achievement. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 38:57-86.