SUNY Brockport can be a hub for success when students get involved and chase their passions, and there’s no better example than Professor Mariel Rivera-Piluso. Before she began pursuing her PhD at Syracuse University, she graduated from SUNY Brockport in 2016 with a degree in Anthropology and Women & Gender Studies. Now, she’s come back to her alma mater to teach and inspire the next generation of aspiring anthropologists.
Rivera-Piluso’s story doesn’t start at Brockport. Coming out of her hometown in Monroe County, she initially wanted to go to a bigger university to pursue her undergraduate degree.
“Basically, I came from Monroe Community College (MCC), and I knew I was going to do a two plus two program, just because for me it was more feasible. I’m an only child with a single mom, so just expense-wise, I was trying to do whatever was most cost effective,” Rivera-Piluso said. “But I wanted to go to Buffalo. I wanted to go to UB, and I was like, ‘It’s a bigger campus. It has more opportunities, blah, blah, blah.’ But the reality was, I couldn’t afford to move all the way out there by myself. So, it was just kind of coming down to the circumstances that I was in and the resources I had.”
Luckily, the academics and other opportunities at Brockport proved to be just what Rivera-Piluso needed to thrive. This included her field of study through the Anthropology Department and the Women & Gender Studies Department, of course, but on-campus club involvement can be just as important as academic involvement.
“I got connected with the CSTEP/McNair programs that are on campus. I also became active in a club that isn’t here anymore, but it was called AAUW, which was the American Association of University Women, which was essentially kind of like the Women and Gender Studies Club on campus. And I was also involved in Anthro Club, and I studied abroad,” Rivera-Piluso said.
The CSTEP/McNair programs are meant to give students the tool to find a long-term career in their field of study, with CSTEP (Collegiate Science & Technology Entry Program) focusing on scientific fields of study. The key to this level of involvement, according to Rivera-Piluso, is agency. She attributes a lot of her positive experiences to her willingness to go out and make the best of her college career.
“I had way more experiences than I would have ever thought coming to Brockport. It was definitely one of those things where you have to make the experience what it is for you. You have to go and seek out opportunities, even if I went to UB, they weren’t just going to land on my lap,” Rivera-Piluso said. “I would have had to be actively searching for that. So, that became kind of my mission, just what opportunities can I get, what resources can I get, where can I get connected.”
Rivera-Piluso definitely got connected in ways that helped her form the research and work she’s doing right now. Through her participation in the study abroad program, she was able to find her passion for maternal health through an anthropological lens and use that as the basis for her ongoing dissertation.
“Essentially in Peru, the study abroad program was through the nursing department and through a Spanish department at Niagara University. So, it was bringing together college students from both colleges on this topic. I got really introduced into the world of maternal health and women’s health in that capacity, and just started to think about a lot of questions that my work deals with now, like how do people get access to things? Or what if things aren’t inclusive?” Rivera-Piluso said. “When we look at women’s health care, a lot of the time we’re not thinking about these indigenous rural women in Peru that are living very much isolated and the services that they can get or can’t get. So, a lot of the work that I do now is definitely influenced by that experience.”
Applying this passion to her work at Syracuse University helped her realize that while overseas anthropology is important work, research doesn’t have to be distant and foreign to be meaningful.
“When I entered grad school at Syracuse, I actually went in thinking I was gonna do my dissertation research on this work in Peru. But, because I’m so separated from Peru, it’s not like I can go there every week, I really could only go during the summer. I wanted to have a connection that was closer to home that I could think about the work a little bit more,” Rivera-Piluso explained. “To me, that kind of represented a shift I had in thinking that as an anthropologist, I have to go somewhere else to do the work, right? I gotta go work with people that are so different from me where there’s so much work too. While that work is important, there’s also this work that’s happening right here where I live.”
This focus on maternal health justice and some of the inequities found in that field right in New York State helps Rivera-Piluso combine her expertise in anthropology and women’s studies. This is common for anthropologists, because the scope of studying humans is so wide, scholars will often find their niche and center their research around that topic.
“They’re not just solely anthropologists; they’re maybe working in economics or they’re working on politics. For me, feminist anthropology has always really spoken to me since I was introduced to it, so it just seemed like a natural fit for what my perspectives are and the type of work that I wanted to get involved with,” Rivera-Piluso said.
As for the work she’s doing now at SUNY Brockport, Rivera-Piluso considers that just as important as her anthropological work. She understands the importance of education from her own experience in academia, but also from the standpoint of creating positive change in the world.
“There are so many ways that all of us can make small changes and can do some of the things that we wanna see in the world. For me a lot of that is done through my teaching and my research, and just generally being a woman of color in the classroom,” Rivera-Piluso said. “That itself is kind of a political thing. Just putting a kernel of an idea into somebody’s brain can influence how they see what’s happening around them.”
While change is being created in her classrooms, Rivera-Piluso is continuing to work on her dissertation and prepares to finish out her PhD in the near future. After that, she’ll be taking some long-awaited rest and seeing where the next steps take her and her career.
