USF alumnus Dr. Nolan Kline has used his training and educational knowledge obtained from earning both his doctoral and master’s degrees from the USF College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthropology as the basis for his career addressing social and health issues.
Kline, who is currently serving as an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Central Florida and who also holds an MPH from the USF College of Public Health, says that he was motivated to choose his USF degree majors by a desire to ignite change.
“The combination of an applied anthropology degree, with its focus on solving real-world problems, and a public health degree, with its focus on preventing rather than curing illness, was a perfect fit for me,” he explained.
Kline credits his knack for stepping back to look at the bigger picture from his time as a student in the Department of Anthropology.
“My anthropology background has given me such a powerful lens through which to see and understand any scenario. Anthropologists learn how to see situations holistically, so seeing ‘the big picture’ comes naturally to us. This has helped me contribute to teams and lead initiatives related to all kinds of health and social topics, including vaccination inequality, cancer screening, policing, social justice activism, and more,” he said.
His book, “Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the U.S. South,” released in 2019, was based off his dissertation research conducted as a doctoral candidate.
“It examines how federal and state immigration laws converge with local police practices, like routine traffic stops, to have multiple hidden, health-related impacts,” he explained. “In the book, I show how immigration enforcement and police practice contribute to undocumented immigrants’ poor health, disrupt immigrants’ family dynamics, create challenges and frustrations for health providers, and harm hospitals and safety-net medical systems.”
Kline has taught several community-based courses in which students work collaboratively with community organizations to address local public health issues and apply principles in real-world settings.
His work has also been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), including a current study funded through NIH’s Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS).
“The ComPASS study is an exciting initiative from NIH. Our specific study is a community-led, health equity, structural intervention (CHESI). The idea behind this type of intervention is that community-based organizations partner with academic researchers to collaboratively design a structural intervention to address a large-scale public health problem,” he explained. “Structural interventions are meant to respond to the societal, political, and economic contexts that shape poor health, thereby making social structures themselves a focus of change. My community partner is the Healthy Tarrant County Collaborative, in Fort Worth, Texas. Together, we’re designing an intervention to improve the relationship between law enforcement officers and people who are minoritized due to their race, ethnicity, immigration status, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
He describes his most meaningful project as a study funded by the National Science Foundation following the 2016 Pulse shooting in Orlando, Fla. and the leaders he worked with who helped to transform community spaces in central Florida.
The common thread driving all of his research endeavors comes back to his training in applied anthropology and public health at USF.
“All of my coursework helped shape my thinking. For example, my environmental anthropology course taught by Dr. Rebecca Zarger helped me reframe my understanding of environment in ways I continue to carry with me,” he said. “My anthropological theory course taught by Dr. Heide Castañeda sparked my curiosity in social theories that continue to inform my work. My visual anthropology course, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Bird, taught me so much about methods like photovoice, and my first-year seminar, which was team taught by Dr. Thomas Pluckhan, Dr. David Himmelgreen, and Dr. Rebecca Zarger, showed me the importance and value of anthropology’s four-field emphasis: looking at the human experience from a cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological perspective.”
He encourages students who are just starting their educational journeys to embrace the opportunities to get out of their “comfort zones.”
“Remember that learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom! As your embrace your disciplinary lenses, don’t be afraid to explore how other disciplines think about the same topics that interest you and recognize what makes your lens unique while you look for the contributions of other lenses, too.”
Dr. Kline with members of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) during his time as a USF doctoral candidate in 2013. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Nolan Kline)
Dr. Kline participating in a march in downtown Atlanta with members of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights. (Photo courtesy of Dr. Nolan Kline)