Goodfellow focuses on health and environment in Baltimore.

Things I've Learned with Prof. Goodfellow

Anthropology professor speaks on his research, night in jail last week

By: Pooja Shah

Posted: 11/13/08

On election night, Professor Aaron Goodfellow experienced a new side of the city when he was arrested by the Baltimore City Police Department for "inciting a riot" during the post-election celebrations in Charles Village.

Through his fieldwork as a professor and administrator in the Department of Anthropology and the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Aaron Goodfellow has reached far beyond the Homewood campus to study topics like infectious diseases and ecological risks in Baltimore.

The News-Letter caught up with Professor Goodfellow on Tuesday to chat about his present and future areas of anthropological research, as well as his sentiments regarding his arrest.

News-Letter (N-L): Did you always know you wanted to do anthropology research?

Aaron Goodfellow (AG): No, definitely not. I came to anthropology relatively late in my career. I had a whole previous life as a carpenter. I spent five years building houses in Seattle before going to graduate school.

N-L: Then what finally drew you to anthropology?

AG: I'm not really sure. It wasn't necessarily the field that drew me in, it was more my interests that found a home in anthropology. I knew that I wanted to spend some time thinking in depth about issues.

When I left my undergraduate career at the University of Vermont, I knew that I had some sort of unfinished business and I knew there was more work that I wanted to pursue in certain conceptual veins, although it wasn't clear to me where. It wasn't clear if I wanted to do it in anthropology, history or even philosophy. And after being out of school for five years, I just happened to apply to anthropology departments because it seemed like that was the field that would allow me the broadest possibilities for exploring the ideas and concepts that interest me.

N-L: Why did you take those five years off before graduate school?

AG: It wasn't clear to me if I wanted to go back to school yet. I knew that I wanted to eventually, but I had other things that I wanted to do. I really wanted to go climbing, and I really wanted to go skiing. I wanted to indulge in those things. And it wasn't clear to me if an academic life was something that I wanted to commit to.

Then, after five years of living in the world of construction, which is either steak or ramen, I was like, there has got to be a different way of living.

N-L: How did you get involved with your field work with infectious diseases in Baltimore?

AG: It was a very accidental and unanticipated set of circumstances that brought me to that work. I was awarded a post-doc in the division of Infectious Disease at the Hopkins medical school. I was asked to take part in an ongoing study that was doing a large scale survey of the ecological risks that place adolescents at a heightened danger for sexually transmitted diseases, and I was teamed with a person who had never done any ethnographic field work. So I was there to assist, and I got hooked.

N-L: What hooked you?

AG: It was remarkable. What really hooked me was the stark contrast of moving from an institution like the Hopkins medical school or the Homewood Campus to different sites of healing and different sites of care that were literally in the shadows, one mile away at drug and alcohol treatment centers in west Baltimore, but appearing to be a completely different world.

N-L: Compared to the other places you've conducted your research, how have you found Baltimore to be different?

AG: I think what's different about Baltimore is the shift in atmosphere where you can literally go block to block and the social climate changes radically. There are a lot of other cities that have this quality, but there is something very striking about the way that you just walk three blocks in Baltimore and you walk through three completely different environments, three separate social worlds. And it's very easy to operate as though the worlds don't touch one another, but they absolutely do.

N-L: You're about to complete your dissertation on gay men and families. What was your research about?

AG: I was looking at the meaning of being a father and forming a family for same-sex couples and what is the desire to do so. We have such a strictly defined notion of the family as being a heterosexual institution.

Just look at Proposition 8 in California that was just passed [to ban same-sex marriage]. You can see that there's a real anxiety that circulates throughout the entire country about the possibility that something like marriage and the family is not an exclusively heterosexual arrangement.

And I was interested in how that societal anxiety, the political message that is circulated in the wider public, is mediated in the intimate spaces of the family relations themselves.

N-L: Your developing research will look into the injuries incurred by soldiers coming back from the war in Iraq. What sparked your interest in that topic?

AG: I was on a long flight from California back to Baltimore, and I read a Rolling Stone article about the profile of injuries that are generated by the conflict in Iraq. I was really interested by this because the profile of injuries in Iraq is completely different from any other war. This difference has to do with the way the body is now armored and the way fighting takes place now.

The majority of the injuries in Iraq are concussive force injuries. The injury is completely unapparent to the exterior, so the body's visible surface may not be disrupted in any way, shape or form. Yet the body is profoundly altered.

I was very curious about what decides a successful rehabilitation when the surface of the body is not affected. It's not like you can visibly recognize the injury or the wound, but it's something psychological as well as a possible neurological alteration of the body. So my question is: What constitutes recovery when you can't see a physical cure?

N-L: Where will you conduct this research?

AG: Baltimore would be the perfect place. Between Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] and the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, they are developing many new therapies around here.

N-L: Can you tell me about the series of events that took place on election night prior to your arrest?

AG: I was coming back from a party with a friend, and we drove though the intersection on 33rd and St. Paul. This was after the results of the election had been announced. There was a huge crowd of people in the streets chanting 'Obama' and 'Yes, we can!'

It was an event that was so out of the ordinary for Charles Village and for Hopkins, that it was so infectious. It was an incredibly warm celebration, and to see this taking place, it made us very curious. So we went to join and see what was going on. It was very bizarre because the police were right there in the crowd.

N-L: When did they begin arresting people?

AG: At some point, something changed and the attitude of the police completely switched. We ran into police who were telling us to move and go home, but not allowing us to move in the direction of our home. We were kind of penned in.

The next thing I knew, they had grabbed my friend, and of course I tried to intervene. And then that was it for me. I was cuffed and stuffed into a police van.

N-L: Do you feel like the Baltimore City Police Department is obligated to do anything to redress the situation on election night?

AG: The sad thing is they are obligated to do nothing. After we were arrested, the police were actively trying to intimidate us and cement our fear. They wouldn't say what we had been charged with. When we were taken to [the Central Booking facility], some people were strip searched, and others were put in solitary confinement.

For every single one of these violations, including the aggression at the hands of the police, the ACLU has standing lawsuits against the Baltimore City Police Department. What is interesting to me about that is it shows the level of everyday violence perpetrated by the police, with full knowledge that it is being challenged in the court of law.

N-L: Are you going to do anything about it?

AG: The detective refused to take my complaint. I think at minimum, the police department should formally apologize. But will it happen? Probably not, it's just a pipe dream.