Tali Ziv's research centers on mass incarceration, addiction, and poverty in the U.S. City. Her current research explores the contemporary decarceration efforts in Philadelphia, examining the political, economic, and community-based forces that have shaped the incarceration alternative landscape. Currently, Tali is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology with certificates in both Africana and Urban studies. She received a BA in Neoliberal Economics and Public Health as well as a Masters in Public Health in 2011 from the University of Michigan. Tali has conducted this dissertation research in collaboration with various city agencies, participating in applied projects both technically and advocacy-based in the field of re-entry, and with the generous support of the Wenner Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Wolf Humanities Center.
Tali Ziv
Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow
2020—2021 Forum on Choice
Tali Ziv
Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology
Chasing Recovery: Governance, Accumulation, and Mobility in Philadelphia’s Drug Treatment Network
My dissertation investigates addiction treatment and incarceration reduction programming in Philadelphia. These programs all hinge on the power of individual agency and accountability, the structures that potentiate the individual power of choice. I attend to the lives of those involved in these programs, and those of the institutional staff who guide them to a life where they make “better choices.” This dissertation disassembles these choices, as well as the frames of accountability that make them possible, to reassemble them anew from a historical and contemporary standpoint. In so doing, my dissertation reveals the social and political-economic continuities that transcend the mass incarceration and decarceration eras, illuminating the intimate and structural dimensions of choice that govern informal labor, substance involvement, and violence.