Many of our spotlights are new staff and new students. They’re often starting their research journeys with us. Our newest colleague is an established researcher taking the next step in her work.
Tasseli McKay is coming to CHER to continue her research. And she’s looking forward to collaboration and expansion. We’re excited to welcome her and look forward to seeing where our collaborations lead!
Get to know Tasseli in this Q&A.
Tell us about your role at CHER. What’s your position and focus?
I’m a CHER faculty member and faculty in Social Medicine.
CHER has an incredible portfolio of transformative work underway, and I’m excited to be a part of building that and to participate in the intellectual life of the center.
What was your path to CHER?
I have been really passionate about health equity issues for my whole career.
I did my MPH in health behavior at UNC quite a long time ago, and worked with the UNC School of Medicine folks on disparities in HIV care for folks involved in the criminal legal system.
Since then, I’ve worked primarily on the intersection between health and structural violence, and especially the relationship between the most common form of violence—violence in families—and US state violence against communities of color in a time of mass incarceration.
That was the focus of my doctoral research at London School of Economics and also, most recently, the focus of my NSF-funded research as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke.
I have a lot of admiration for the work that folks that CHER are doing to address health inequity and to build the foundation for broad based health equity across many different forms of health and well-being, and to me freedom from violence and state violence is really central to health and wellbeing.
What are your goals while at CHER?
Right now, I’m focused full-time on a study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, “Institutional responsiveness and violence in families in a time of mass incarceration.”
It’s about understanding the ways that our interactions with public agencies and government institutions in a time of mass surveillance and widespread criminal legal system contact in vulnerable communities shape experiences of family violence. Including the willingness and ability to seek help.
And I’m also interested in how mass surveillance and criminalization shape the research process, what people who live in the crosshairs of the state are willing to tell us as researchers and how that shapes what we know or think we know about violence.
Over the next five years or so, I’ll be working to build out new research in two main directions:
- Building a theory and practice of reparative research methods for the study of violence.
- Assessing the effectiveness of redress for US state violence against communities of color for reducing violence in families.
What are some challenges you’ve faced in your field of work?
Doing collaborative work on how we not just address, but redress histories of research injustice in our research going forward.
And shifting the focus and the framing of our research in ways that maximize our ability to shape and transform the real world.
What’s a fun fact about you?
I have five-year-old triplets! They are awesome.