Wayne State's School of Social Work and Department of Anthropology celebrated the launch of their joint-title Ph.D. with a Nov. 6 talk by a health care policymaker whose career illustrates the integration of both disciplines.

Luke Bergmann, author of the Detroit drug trade chronicle "Getting Ghost" and senior director of behavioral health at New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, delivered the inaugural lecture of the new Social Work and Anthropology (SWAN) doctoral degree program, which began admitting students this fall. Speaking in the David Adamany Undergraduate Library's Bernath Auditorium, Bergmann described his anthropological, clinical, and policy work on substance use and endorsed the interdisciplinary training offered by the SWAN degree.

"The convergence of social work and anthropology represents an opportunity for moving both disciplines in really positive directions," said Bergmann, who earned a Ph.D. in Social Work and Cultural Anthropology from University of Michigan. Effectively integrated, he said, their greatest potential may be in the realm of systems change.

"The central orientation of anthropology is very much aligned with what social work is all about," Bergmann said, noting that anthropology is concerned with how society constructs and defines itself while social work is concerned with how society governs itself within those constructs and definitions. Child welfare workers, for example, practice within a system governed by society's fundamental beliefs about children and childhood, he said. Anthropology's practice of interrogating the categories used to understand how people live and social work's practice of identifying injustices inherent in those categories is a marriage, concluded Bergmann, "that can bear politically conscious children."

Bergmann, whose interdisciplinary training includes a bachelor's degree in anthropology and master's degrees in anthropology and social work, described the convergence of the two disciplines in his own work, most notably in his ethnographic study of young heroin traffickers in Detroit and his contributions to New York Medicaid policy. The former, which became the subject of both his doctoral dissertation and "Getting Ghost," was facilitated by his work developing and administering quality assurance measures for mental health services at a Wayne County juvenile detention facility. Rejecting facile, binary divisions such as black and white, suburb and city, opulence and depravation allowed Bergmann to arrive at an ethnography of these young men that revealed the fluidity of their experience with respect to spaces, institutions, and communities. It also informed his orientation as a social worker toward the systems most profoundly affecting these men's lives, most notably the criminal justice system.

Bergmann's career turned in the direction of health care administration and policy related to substance use, spanning positions with the Detroit Department of Health and Wellness Promotion, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and his current appointment with the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. Bergmann said his training in anthropology, which examines how numerous small narratives make up large cultural constructs, has helped him affect changes in policy, which similarly is shaped through numerous, "insulated" conversations between decisionmakers. Particularly helpful, Bergmann said, is his ability to navigate his colleagues' "institutional understanding of the legitimacy and illegitimacy of services" through careful use of language. To illustrate, Bergmann said he succeeded in getting Medicaid to reimburse harm reduction services, which are viewed by many as enabling substance abuse, by training his staff to refer to them as "Ryan White services," which has more positive political connotations.

One of only two joint-title Ph.D. programs in the United States combining social work and anthropology, SWAN is training professionals who can develop client-centered, culturally appropriated solutions to societal problems, particularly within governmental or nonprofit agencies that work on urban or international topics. For more information on the program, please visit http://clas.wayne.edu/swan/.

http://socialwork.wayne.edu/news.php?id=15732