Research & Inquiry

Circumvitalis is an evolving body of work grounded in research exploring how embodied practices of care - hydration, nourishment, movement, and relational well-being - shape experiences of health, healing, and vitality in everyday life.

This inquiry began through lived experience. Years of navigating chronic inflammation, fatigue, and persistent discomfort revealed the limitations of approaches that treat the body in isolation from its broader contexts. What emerged instead was a deeper curiosity: how do everyday practices - how we drink, eat, move, and relate - influence not only physical well-being, but our broader experience of being in the world?

Through Circumvitalis, these questions are explored by attending closely to the body as a site of knowledge. Hydration, nourishment, and mobility are approached not simply as interventions, but as practices embedded within cultural meanings, environmental conditions, relational contexts that shape how care is understood and enacted.

Of particular interest is how these practices are understood within Afro-diasporic traditions of healing, where well-being is often approached as relational rather than individual - shaped through connections to community, land, memory, and everyday ritual. These perspectives offer alternative frameworks for understanding health that extend beyond dominant biomedical models.

This work also considers how experiences such as chronic inflammation, stress, and mid-life transition are interpreted and managed across different contexts, and how alternative frameworks of care may offer pathways toward greater resilience, adaptability, and collective well-being.

As this inquiry continues to evolve, it forms the foundation of this ongoing research trajectory in sociocultural anthropology, with a focus on embodied knowledge, relational worldviews, and community-based practices of care within diasporic contexts.