Research

I am a cultural/medical anthropologist with a research focus on aging, migration, and processes of meaning-making. I am interested in how growing up and growing older in migratory contexts influences subjective aging experiences. At the same time, I take aging as central to migrant identity construction, seeking to understand how age intersects with race, class, and gender to shape migrant experiences of social inclusion and exclusion.

I explored these topics in my dissertation, In Search of Tranquility: Migration and Older Puerto Rican Adults’ Quests for a Good Old Age. During the pandemic, I employed remote ethnographic methods with older Puerto Rican adults, their families, and service providers in the Greater Cleveland area to understand: 1) how older Puerto Rican adults conceptualize a subjective good old age; and 2) how they navigate im/mobility regimes—the political economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced, and permitted to move and to migrate—in the quest for a good old age. I traced older adults’ quests across space and time to show how political economic processes rooted in US colonialism simultaneously condition migration as a strategy for the pursuit of a good old age and contribute to inequitable circumstances that make a good old age hard to find. My findings advanced understanding of how individuals develop notions of a good old age and how they respond when their ability to achieve a good old age is constrained by inequitable political, economic, and socio-cultural forces. In so doing, my dissertation served as a corrective to aging theories that have privileged stability and individual-level adaptations, while obscuring the broader power dynamics that organize who lives a good old age, as they define it, and who does not.

While my dissertation focused on old age, my previous research broadly examined inequality throughout the life course. I worked on a federally-funded, interdisciplinary study, which examined neighborhood contexts of child maltreatment (PI: James Spilsbury, Ph.D.). My work produced several peer-reviewed articles on intergenerational relationships, child well-being, and child maltreatment.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters

  • Jespersen, B. V. (2024). The quest for a good old age: Mobility, immobility and Puerto Rican aging in the United States. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2412156

  • Pleasant, T., & B. Jespersen. (2024).Veterans Affairs Caribbean Health Care System: Recommendations to strengthen Age-Friendly Health Systems in the post-pandemic Caribbean. Archives of Medical Research, 55 (6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arcmed.2024.103036

  • Maguire-Jack, K., Jespersen, B., Korbin, J. E., Van Berkel, D., & Spilsbury, J. C. (2022). Neighborhood effects on child maltreatment in rural areas. In K. Maguire-Jack & C. Katz (Eds.), Neighborhoods, communities, and child maltreatment: A global perspective (pp. 117-130). Springer.

  • Jespersen, B. V., Korbin, J. E., & Spilsbury, J. C. (2021). Older neighbors and the neighborhood context of child well-being: Pathways to enhancing social capital for children. American Journal of Community Psychology 0, 1-12. DOI 10.1002/ajcp.12520

  • Jespersen, B. V., Hildebrand, V. M., Korbin, J. E., & Spilsbury, J. C. (2021). The influence of neighborhood violent crime on child-rearing: Integrating neighborhood ecologies and stratified reproduction approaches. Social Science and Medicine, 272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113705

  •  Maguire-Jack, K., Jespersen, B. V., Korbin, J. E., & Spilsbury, J. C. (2020). Rural child maltreatment: A scoping literature review. Trauma, Violence & Abuse. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838020915592

  •  Spilsbury, J. C., Nadan, Y., Kaye-Tzadok, A., Korbin, J. E., Jespersen, B. V., & Allen, B. J. (2018). Caregivers’ perceptions and attitudes toward child maltreatment: A pilot case study in Tel Aviv, Israel and Cleveland, USA. The International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy, and Practice, 1, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42448-018-0003-1