Tali Ziv, PhD

Tali Ziv recently graduated with a PhD from the Anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation explored the contemporary decarceration efforts in Philadelphia, examining the community-based institutional transformation that has shaped the incarceration alternative landscape. She conducted this ethnographic research through a structural analysis of the historical economic and political forces that shaped both carceral and decarceral approaches to the social issues of addiction and poverty as well as an analysis of individuals’ experiences navigating these systems. Tali conducted this research in collaboration with various city agencies, engaging her public health training to bring the ethnographic data from her anthropological research into conversation with applied initiatives and interventions at the municipal level.  Prior to her time at Penn, she received her BA and MPH from the University of Michigan where she designed her own major and course of graduate study in political-economy and global health. This work was regionally focused in Latin America and the Caribbean and topically emphasized substance abuse, incarceration, and HIV/AIDS. As a Hecht-Levi fellow, Tali is interested in exploring the moral and ethical implications of relapse in the study of addiction and incarceration. Further, she is interested in exploring the moral injuries incurred from active substance abuse, incarceration, and untreated mental illness.