About

Adrienne Strong is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, with affiliations in the Center for African Studies and the Department of Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and the Universiteit van Amsterdam, along with a Certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her academic background also includes an A.M. in Cultural Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and a B.S. in Biomedical Science from The Ohio State University. Strong's research primarily focuses on maternal mortality in health facilities, where she conducts ethnographic work examining the roles of healthcare workers and administrators in producing maternal deaths, especially in low-resource settings. Her work highlights the ethical dilemmas faced by maternity care providers who must navigate accountability mechanisms that often force them to choose between their careers and the lives of women, revealing the complex social dynamics within maternity wards that contribute to maternal deaths. This research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Fulbright-Hays, among others. Strong has also been recognized with several honors, including the University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Award and the Society for Medical Anthropology's Eileen Basker Memorial Book Prize. Her contributions significantly expand understanding of maternal health care challenges and the sociocultural factors influencing maternal mortality.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Anthropology
• Economic growth
• Economics
• Law
• Public relations
• Medicine
• Engineering
• Psychology
• Engineering ethics
• Socioeconomics
• Geography
• Nursing

Selected publications

• Beyond One Place for Birth

  2025-10-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the Global North, there is often a dichotomy between obstetrics and midwifery care. While childbirth is a global experience, choice in place of birth is the privilege of a small subset of the global population. This chapter presents a brief overview of where debates about place of birth originated, particularly for women in the Global South but rooted in priorities and anxieties of the Global North. Using examples from Tanzania and the United States, the chapter troubles the dichotomised debates in the Global North. For birthing people globally, the legacies of colonialism and racism have led to choice only being a choice for some. A push to institutionalise birth is also in tension with broad attempts to understand pregnancy as not a disease and therefore not requiring hospitalisation. Ongoing stratified exposure to risk during pregnancy and birth suggests that effective maternity care cannot be debated at this obstetrics versus midwifery level but must collaboratively work to acknowledge social and physiological risks and rewards inherent in the liminal periods of pregnancy and birth.

  PublisherDOI

• iPhone Pregnancies: Self-Testing as Surveillance and Care in the Trying to Conceive Community

  Medical Anthropology · 2025-03-30

  articleSenior author

  People trying to conceive (TTC) often rely on accessible technologies and associated apps to track aspects of menstrual cycles. We explore this growing phenomenon from the perspective of self-testing as surveillance-care for the TTC individual or couple and their current and future fertility and pregnancy. Through an analysis of anonymous fora posts, we argue that surveillance-care provides those TTC with a sense of community, as well as agency and control over inexact bodily processes. Here, surveillance-care enacted on the self is about care for the hoped-for future pregnancy, and resulting baby, as opposed to one's own current health status.

  PublisherDOI

• Over-looked Spaces: Theorizing Surveillance Care in Reproductive Health

  Medical Anthropology · 2025-03-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  At the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle, WA, we organized a session called "Landscapes of Surveillance Care in Reproductive Health." This introduction to our special issue represents a sustained conversation among panelists and other scholars regarding the complicated ways that surveillance and care play upon each other in our own ethnographic research and what we might learn from them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sociocultural diversity in approaching pain at the end of life

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-09-16

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Pain is a deeply personal experience, but the ways we attend to it, express it, treat it, and try to resolve it are profoundly shaped by sociocultural values and structural possibilities. Attending to the diverse manifestations and understandings of pain at the end of life is critical both for patient care and for broader understandings of end of life. Location of care for pain, the type of relief available and who can administer it, family roles (desired and required), as well as the perceived role(s) of the healthcare system and healthcare workers all come into play alongside less concrete ideas and considerations related to the quality of pain, forbearance or endurance, suffering, and meaning-making at the end of life. In this chapter, we review anthropological literature on pain and end of life and include examples from our own ethnographic research on pain care in Tanzania.

  PublisherDOI

• Pain Management

  Annual Review of Anthropology · 2025-05-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Anthropology has long engaged in explorations of pain as part of the human condition. Sociocultural values and norms shape expressions and understandings of pain, as well as pain management practices globally. Here, we focus on physical pain to highlight the intersections of race, gender, class, and position in the global neoliberal economy as major themes in shaping attitudes toward pain and accessibility of pain management. Pain is always intersubjective, producing social relations and invoking (sometimes-tenuous) bonds of care, while also revealing power dynamics, inequalities, and struggles for recognition on interpersonal and global scales. We present ethnographic approaches to studying pain, gender and pain, pain and birth, opioids and pain, cancer and end-of-life care, and chronic pain and aging to critically consider the role of social and material life, language, agency, and structural inequalities in the quest to express, recognize, and care for pain.

  PublisherDOI

• Hidden Threats: Patient Decision-Making around Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Surgery in the United States

  Medical Anthropology · 2025-11-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) are pathologic enlargements of the aorta that, if they rupture, are usually fatal. Patients can undergo high-risk surgery to prevent rupture. We explored AAA patients' surgical journeys to understand decision-making and unmet needs. Major interview themes included fear of death, risk perception, importance of partner support, communication with providers, and preparedness for surgery and recovery. The nature of AAAs as chronic conditions that can suddenly become acutely life-threatening lends a unique context to patient decision-making. Understanding patient perspectives and values when undergoing AAA repairs can improve surgeons' abilities to meet patient needs and facilitate shared decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• Bureaucracy and Surveillance-Care: The Partograph in Tanzanian Maternity Care

  Medical Anthropology · 2024-11-05 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Based on fieldwork in maternity wards in Tanzania, I argue that the partograph - a graphical representation of a pregnant woman's labor - far exceeds its intended role as tracking and surveillance of labor progress. Through surveillance and its concomitant documentation, nurses, especially, also utilize this document to co-create care for themselves and their colleagues. These forms of care proliferate largely unseen by global health systems but are vital for understanding the meeting point of bureaucracy, surveillance, and care and the dynamics of maternity care in this and other lower resource settings. Nurses use the partograph to generate novel forms of surveillance-care.

  PublisherDOI

• Belly Woman: Birth, Blood & Ebola: The Untold Story

  Anthropology and Medicine · 2024-04-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective

  Routledge eBooks · 2024 · 139 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Social Vulnerability Is Associated With Higher Rates of Hospitalizations and Amputations for Peripheral Arterial Disease

  The American Journal of Cardiology · 2023-08-04 · 5 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Sociocultural Practices in Maternal Healthcare

  NSF · $82k · 2017–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Mohammed Elzeneini

  Florida College

  2 shared

• Samir K. Shah

  University of Florida

  2 shared

• Carolyn Sargent

  2 shared

• Emma Varley

  Brandon University

  2 shared

• Khanjan B. Shah

  University of Florida

  2 shared

• Yujia Li

  Northwest University

  2 shared

• Carl J. Pepine

  University of Florida

  2 shared

• Scott A. Berceli

  2 shared

Education

• MA and PhD, Anthropology

  Washington University in Saint Louis

  2017

• Ph.D., Medical Anthropology

  Universiteit van Amsterdam

  2017

• B.S., Biomedical Science

  Ohio State University

  2010