Dr. Knight received a B.A. (Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology) from Georgetown University, a M.Ed. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the joint doctoral program in medical anthropology at University of California – San Francisco/Berkeley. She teaches in the UCSF/UCB medical anthropology graduate program and UCSF Institute of Global Health Sciences, serves as curricular advisor and lecturer in addiction medicine and structural competency for the UCSF School of Medicine, and is faculty mentee in the Department of Psychiatry.
Dr. Knight’s work centers on the social construction of addiction in clinical and policy contexts, racialized health disparities, and health conditions produced or exacerbated by structural violence. She conducts National Institutes of Health-funded ethnographic research focused on the US opioid epidemic, the mental and physical health sequelae of housing insecurity, substance use, and reproduction. Dr. Knight has authored numerous publications in the fields of public health, social science and medicine. Her book-length ethnography, addicted.pregnant.poor (Duke University Press, 2015), was awarded the British Sociological Association’s Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness (FSHI) 2016 Book Award, was a finalist for the 2015 C. Wright Mills Award, and received an Honorable Mention for the Society of Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker 2016 Book Prize.