University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Assistant Professor

Arts and Sciences

About

Elizabeth Elliott Cooper (MPH U. of South Florida, 2006; PhD U. of South Florida, 2009) is an applied medical anthropologist with an area specialization in Southeast Asia, particularly non-peninsular Malaysia.  Her research interests include nutritional anthropology – food security, dietary delocalization, and hunger and household coping strategies – the anthropology of policy, and cognitive, visual, and participatory methodologies.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Fellowship, and Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, Dr. Cooper’s doctoral research combines historical inquiry with the in-depth, ethnographic study of two predominantly Malay coastal villages in Malaysian Borneo to assess the ways in which common, local foods are perceived and categorized and the degree to which these understandings are shared both (1) within the communities and (2) between the communities and the clinics that serve them.  By relating cultural models for food classification to health education messages, food supplementation guidelines, community conditions, and food beliefs and practices, Dr. Cooper has been able to address the relative fit of current nutritional programming within the local village context.  She has proposed concrete design recommendations for a successful, child-specific food package in the short-term while arguing for a more holistic, household-level solution.  Her current focus is on the appropriate dissemination of these findings and a more detailed explanation of:

•Microenvironments within the fieldsites which appear to dictate differential diets and prioritize distinct sets of foods for family clusters
•Spatial patterns of food insecurity and child undernutrition in relation to food-related resources and access to health care
•The coping strategies and differential success of identified positive deviance households
•Themes of child agency, gendered parental responsibility for child undernutrition, and the negotiation of acceptance versus adaptation response categories in the face of scarcity and food insecurity.

Dr. Cooper believes in critical pedagogy, has taught previously at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and published a recent book chapter on the use of television in teaching anthropological theory in Teaching Strategies in Anthropology.

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