Frederick Charles Howard

This project investigates how adults experiencing homelessness make sense of oral health and navigate access to dental care in conditions of insecurity and exclusion. Teeth and the mouth are socially charged sites of identity and self-worth—integral to how people present themselves and relate to others—yet dentistry is often treated as separate from and secondary to medicine and remains out of reach for many without stable housing. Working in collaboration with COMO, a day shelter in Columbus, Ohio, an interdisciplinary team comprised of an anthropologist, a dentist trained in qualitative methods, and a public health specialist will use ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and co-design workshops to understand how people experience oral health challenges and what forms of care feel meaningful and attainable. The study examines how factors such as stigma, mistrust, and past experiences of neglect shape care-seeking and avoidance, as well as how service providers perceive and respond to these dynamics. By combining ethnographic attention to lived experience with participatory design-based approaches, the project explores how oral health care might be made more attentive to the needs and experiences of people living with homelessness, expanding anthropology’s understanding of care and inequality in contemporary urban life.