ERICKA KIMBALL

DR. ERICKA KIMBALL

Dr. Ericka Kimball's scholarship is critically focused on the domains of domestic violence and healthcare, with the goal of understanding and developing alternatives to current practices. Mainstream responses in this area are largely focused on secondary and tertiary intervention at the individual level — such as shelter, protective orders, and healthcare screening. Her work is informed by the wicked problems framework, which holds that social problems are so complex as to be virtually unsolvable, and that interactions between systems are so intricate that addressing one issue may create a cascade of new ones.
Drawing on this framework, Dr. Kimball examines how social problems are formulated and works to develop alternative responses at the highest possible level of intervention. This means moving away from targeted, individual-level interventions toward challenging the definitions of complex social problems, the systems of control deployed in response to those definitions, and the reliance on professionalized interventions.