When Scott described her interests in women’s health, in doing further work in Mexico, in working in the academy and in having an impact on policy, her father’s friend, a medical anthropologist, recommended that she consider graduate programs in applied medical anthropology.

“To be honest, I really didn’t know that there was a medical anthropology concentration,” Scott explained. Now as she finishes up her dissertation, on track to be completed in March 2010, Scott’s research on the effects of transnational migration on women’s health places her in both cultural and medical anthropology.

The path toward her current research interests began during her senior year at Duke University. She studied abroad in the state of Guerrero in western Mexico and then stayed on for an extra semester, working with a nurse doing research in one of the state’s small communities.

Scott said that was the first time she saw a community’s women staying behind while its men were away earning money. In Guerrero she observed that the men went back and forth to the city where they sold baskets the women made. “I just noticed the incredible burden on women in terms of what they had to do, the care of the home,” explained Scott. The women talked about how hard it was to manage everything on the home front with the men away.

The national conversation regarding immigration in America has focused predominantly on the migrants who come into the United States. But Scott urges that there is a much more complex story to be told. “I just felt like it was really important to tell women’s stories, to tell the stories of the people left behind,” she said.

Still, studying the effects of transnational migration on communities wasn’t her original intent, but that all changed when Scott travelled to a community in the state of Veracruz to do her preliminary research. Residents had been leaving this particular community for jobs in the United States and in larger Mexican cities for only about five years, so it was still relatively new for the community. Scott shifted her research to study the effects of this migration on women’s health, something no one had looked at before.

As she delved into her research, Scott was surprised to find the impact on women and the extent to which women were ignoring their own well-being. She met grandmothers with chronic health conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension, who were essentially becoming mothers to their young grandchildren when the children’s parents went to the United States or to border cities for work.

One woman who used to be able to control her diabetes with her diet now needed insulin. In order to get insulin from the clinic, she had to wait all day with her three-year-old grandchild in tow. That is, if the clinic even had the insulin in stock. “She didn’t feel like there was any choice,” Scott said, and explained that the grandmother couldn’t send the kids to their parents or ask the parents to return. Caring for the children was “what had to be done, but the effects of that were pretty severe for her.”

According to Scott, many women speak of the challenges of having to be both mother and father and describe feeling afraid, unprotected and unable to do it all.

As she progressed deeper in her research, Scott found it necessary to adjust her definition of health. Initially she was focused on impacts on physical health, but she discovered that was too narrow a definition. Women were describing an impact that exceeded physical health and extended into an impact on overall well-being. “Their own health and own well-being really came last for most of the women I talked with,” noted Scott.

Although she has come a long way from the conversation that initially encouraged her to consider anthropology, Scott’s long-term vision and interests are largely the same as they were then. The ideas are just more specific now, she said.

She continues to be interested in working in Mexico because “the relationship between the United States and Mexico is powerful, and it has intense effects on people.” She feels that it is important to investigate the relationship between these two countries, and to have a positive impact on making that relationship different.

As she enters the job market, Scott will also be looking for ways to connect the ideas uncovered by her research with the public and with policy makers, which is just what applied anthropology is all about. “There are a lot of anthropologists that are getting their work out to the public,” she enthused, “so I have a lot of role models and people I can consult to figure out how to do that.”