Dennis is best known for her 20 years worth of work on tobacco smoke, the politics of the air and the small, often unnoticed but extremely significant relations of power that are operationalised through the smallest of acts -- like breathing in polluted air, and the relations of first, second, third, fourth and even fifth hand smoke. Dennis is also an expert of the intimacies of alcohol consumption, and the anthropology of disasters and crises. Much of her work concerns (a) public health responses to complex problems, and the important ideas that are often overlooked in them, and the ways in which 'community' is often thought of as a social good that will solve all of our problems.