In a rural part of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, the women Abigail Neely has worked alongside for nearly 20 years plant flowers. They tend them outside mud-brick homesteads, sing together at funerals and celebrations, and keep raising children in a place where AIDS has buried far too many of its young people. Neely reads those flowers as an approach to life.
“These women have so much hope, and they build community, and they love their children and their grandchildren who are still around,” she says. “That is an act of resistance and faith that is unparalleled.”
Neely, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, was named a fellow of the American Association of Geographers earlier this year, in recognition of two decades of work on health, healing, and inequality in South Africa. She has two books on the way. She’s also the house professor of School House, one of Dartmouth’s six residential house communities.
For Neely, care is the throughline of her work as both a scholar and a house professor. Her research site is Pholela, a rural community about 300 miles southeast of Johannesburg that pioneered a model of social medicine the U.S. later emulated. The Pholela Community Health Centre treated the whole person: its doctors went after the root causes of illness, such as hunger and poverty. A young Jack Geiger trained at the center before he helped build the United States’ own network of community health centers under President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Program.
Neely’s first book, Reimagining Social Medicine from the South, argues that the center’s success depended on its residents and their environment in ways its own social and medical sciences overlooked. Researchers still make the trip to Pholela to learn how it worked. One retired nurse, Neely says, got tired of fielding questions and started sending them away with a single instruction: “Go read Abigail’s book. She already did all the research.”
The book Neely is finishing now, When Children Become Ancestors, started with a question she came to during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, when young people were dying in droves in Pholela: what happens when your child becomes your ancestor? During this time, some parents she knew lost five or more children. When an adult child dies, Pholela tradition holds that the child becomes an ancestor and begins to care for the parent who raised them. She wondered about what this does to a place and its people. Neely set out to write about death and dying. She ended up writing about joy.
“How do people not just get by, but thrive in spaces of the utmost adversity?” she asks. “In a world marked by anti-blackness and racial capitalism, how are people making livable, beautiful lives?” She found the answer in everyday things: song, gardens, the older women who meet every week and always end up singing, mothers who keep raising children in the hardest conditions. The book centers the stories of the people she came to know, with the scholarly argument pushed mostly into the endnotes. “This is as much their book as it is my book,” she says.
It’s also personal in a way her earlier work wasn’t. Neely lost both of her parents during the years she was thinking through this material, and the women in Pholela buoyed her through her grief, checking on her from across the world. That shared experience of loss became a theme of the book.
A second book, the co-edited Building Better Worlds, is in peer review, with the manuscript due to the press this year. It gathers approaches to building more caring and inclusive spaces in higher education, across teaching, research methods, and art. Neely’s chapter, “Anecdote As Method,” makes a case for taking anecdotes seriously as evidence. “You can’t have robust data on, for instance, non-binary Native faculty members, because there aren’t enough,” she says. When you want to understand the world from positions outside of power, sometimes the anecdote is the only evidence there is.
Geography gave Neely the flexibility to pull from multiple kinds of evidence. The field predates the moment the academy split into the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, so it stayed interdisciplinary, and Neely’s department engages across all three areas. She says she discovered the field by accident. As an undergraduate astrophysics major, she took an environmental history class on a hunch and tracked down the one geographer on campus.
“To understand the world in all its complexity, it’s really helpful to be able to pull in science papers alongside long-term ethnographic research, perhaps alongside literature,” she says. “If we bring this all together, how can we understand the world in a new way? That’s why it’s exciting to me.”
An Antidote to AI
As School House professor, Neely oversees the intellectual and cultural life of one of Dartmouth’s six house communities, now marking its 10th year. Every undergraduate is placed in a house before their first term; graduate students in the Guarini School, Thayer, and the Dartmouth Institute’s public health programs are folded in automatically, and a growing cohort of faculty fellows has joined the community. House events range from a legendary weekly Wednesday tea to a recent bluegrass brunch at the Cube, where children, undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff all gathered together.
Neely frames that work in the same terms as her scholarship. “The work we do in the house communities to build community for everybody on campus is an act of beautiful, productive resistance to a world that wants everybody to speed up and get more done,” she says. “Centering care is an act of resistance at all levels.”
Lately AI has sharpened that argument for her. After her department’s wellness committee held an event on teaching and learning in the age of AI last spring, students kept voicing the same worry: how AI and screens were reshaping their relationships.
“The house communities are an antidote to the most pernicious aspects of AI,” Neely says. “You are there, you are present, you are thinking together. People don’t have their phones out.”
“If students slow down, take the time, be in community with each other,” she says, “I think we can learn so much about each other, ourselves, and the wider world.”