Allysha Powanda Winburn

ALLYSHA WINBURN, University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Visualizing Structural Vulnerability: Skeletal and Dental Evidence of Embodied Social Marginalization from Anonymized CT Imagery.” In inequitable societies, social marginalization can become physically incorporated into human bodies, with significant detrimental impacts including ill health and early mortality. Though some of these impacts can be seen in the body’s hard tissues, forensic anthropologists have rarely examined correlations between skeletal and dental health and social demographics like race, gender, and socioeconomic status— and never among U.S. groups. This project aimed to do so. The project: 1) Selected 350 identified, anonymized U.S. forensic cases with CT imagery authorized for research by next of kin; 2) Downloaded imagery from roughly equal numbers of men and women of low and high socioeconomic status who identified as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and white, to test the axes along which social marginalization impacts the skeleton and dentition; 3) Developed 41 potential skeletal and dental biomarkers of social inequity—the “Structural Vulnerability Profile” (SVP); 4) Announced the SVP in a peer-reviewed, open access publication; 5) Presented the SVP at the American Association of Biological Anthropologists; 6) Published an open-access Radiograph Guide to inform future investigations of the SVP; and 7) Led an Executive Session on structural vulnerability for the American Anthropological Association. The SVP enables researchers to foreground investigations of social inequity in bioanthropological analyses.