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Welcome back to In the Thick of It. On this podcast, we talk with researchers about how they do what they do, one method at a time. This is a project of the Public Ethnography Lab, housed in the Department of Anthropology at American University. We are a center focused on making ethnographic work matter beyond academia. This is our second season, and it builds on conversations that began at the Public Anthropology Conference held in November 2025. Throughout the season, we will be in conversation with presenters from the conference who are using ethnography and qualitative methods across a wide range of fields. In the episodes, we will dive into the behind-the-scenes of their work by exploring the choices, challenges, and creativity that go into qualitative methods. My name is Eva, and I am your host.
Anthropology, Epidemiology, and the Challenge of Measuring What Matters. In this episode, we talked with Dr. Carrie Perkins. She is a Qualitative Research Scientist at the Washington State Department of Health and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Soka University of America. Her research interests include forced migration and refugee studies in Southeast Asia, multi-modal ethnography as a component of digital storytelling, and urban agriculture in refugee camp design. Her work on incorporating urban agriculture within refugee camps has been published in the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Forced Migration Review, and has been featured on NPR. She is also the creator of “The Art of Exile”, an interactive art gallery presented in virtual reality (VR) that showcases the work of indigenous artists in refugee camps who have been displaced by the civil war in Myanmar. Dr. Perkins has previously held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Irvine, and a Visiting Study Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University.