Please welcome a new faculty member to the USF Department of Emergency Medicine, Social EM, Population and Global Health Section!
Dr. Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo is a theoretical and applied anthropologist studying and mobilizing how people come to access institutional resources (like healthcare and education) through social networks. She focuses on how networks and their composition and function 1) directly facilitate access and 2) modify cultural models (ways of thinking about a domain of life, such as health and healthcare) to more indirectly facilitate access.
Her research advances study and program and policy implementation related to social factors of networks, showing that network homophily matters (i.e., having network members like oneself in some demographic characteristic is not unimportant). Beyond larger social and experiential similarities, homophily can help members provide tailored advice and support attuned to one’s social positionings and journey, to help them receive benefits, counter obstacles, and achieve goals. Campbell-Montalvo works to maximize the provision of quality healthcare services through new work capitalizing on network ties and building upon existing systems praxis centered on social networks, not unlike that in peer support programming in opioid use disorder treatment.
Previously, her work has brought forward theories and applications of social network healthcare access and general resource brokerage at the intersection of home and schooling, including K-12. Her multi-sited work has emphasized this with multiply-marginalized families, including Indigenous Latinx im/migrant farmworking families, who may have mixed healthcare insurance and citizenship statuses and diverse linguistic repertoires. Findings illuminate the support school employees are able to provide families given aspects of shared language, culture, and worldview. She has couched this in sociohistorical globalization—connections between the present and past as well as between overt and covert group relations and resource acquisition—explored in her 2023 book, The Latinization of Indigenous Students (Lexington Books).
In addition to her position as an Assistant Professor in Emergency Medicine in the USF Morsani College of Medicine, she is jointly appointed as a Social Science Analyst at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. There, she primarily works on Traumatic Brain Injury projects out of James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital, and secondarily on patient education and dialysis treatment choice research out of Malcolm Randall VA Medical Center.
A 2016 USF PhD graduate in Applied Anthropology, Campbell-Montalvo was previously at the University of Connecticut, first as a postdoctoral research associate and then an Assistant Research Professor.
Outside work, she enjoys gardening, music (including endeavors as a novice harpist), art, cooking, traveling, and cultivating her collection of antique Christmas ornaments.