The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence

Lori Tremblay is a bioarchaeologist whose research focuses on structural violence and health care provisioning during the Industrial Era. In her research, she explores how normalized social and socioeconomic structures of oppression and marginalization, as well as identity, may have had an impact on health and risk for stress in impoverished and institutionalized populations from the late 19th- and early 20th-century United States. She also examines health care provisioning and efficacy in Industrial Era institutionalized populations. As part of that branch of her research, she contributed a chapter in New Developments in the Bioarchaeology of Care (Springer 2018) that proposed the use of a population-level approach, included a preliminary model for that approach, and highlighted the challenges inherent in conducting population level analysis of health care provisioning and efficacy in the past. Her use of structural violence as a theoretical framework in her recent researchon institutionalized and impoverished populations was the catalyst for the symposium upon which this book is based. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Delhi. Sarah Reedy is a bioarchaeologist whose research specializes in understanding how the poor environmental conditions of the Industrial Era of Europe impacted the growth and development, morbidity, and mortality patterns of children. The stressed conditions from this period, such as rapid urbanization, malnutrition, inequality, and increased infectious diseases, negatively impacted many within these populations, but especially those that were most vulnerable and marginalized. Children are often an overlooked subset of skeletal populations within the field of bioarchaeology, leaving much information about their lives misunderstood and largely unknown. Sarah's work attempts to analyze variables such as sex, age, and status and their impacts onchildren's overall growth and developmental patterns. The use of structural violence as a theoretical framework relates to the marginalization of poor and female children via patriarchal practices during the Industrial Era. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, though performed this research as part of her Doctoral Dissertation and while working as a Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.