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My work is situated at the intersection of history of medicine, anthropology, and STS. Most broadly, I am interested in the relationship between practices of knowledge-making and practices of care work and in the relationship between health work and the political imagination.
I am currently working on two questions. The first is concerned with the role of new data technologies in humanitarian practice, and with how humanitarian and scientific actors use data to imagine, forecast, represent, or contest notions of habitable and livable places. The second asks how cleaning and care work provide alternative sites for understanding and thinking with 'livability' in the context of climate change. Ethnographically, this work focuses on humanitarian experts, scientific researchers, and experts and workers in fields such as home-based care, elder care, home maintenance, and cleaning services.
My prior work focused on the relationship between knowledge-making and carework in global health interventions. My book, Medicine in the Meantime: The work of care in Mozambique (2018), explored this through the lives and afterlives of two transnational medical projects -- projects that enacted deeply divergent understandings of what care means, what it does, and who does it. It showed how global health interventions relied on everyday practices of work and care giving (from janitorial work to health volunteer work to family and neighborhood relations) even as this work was rendered invisible within clinical understandings of expertise.
I have also published articles on pharmaceuticals, trust, global health pedagogy, and methods. If you are interested in my work and are unable to access it, please email me. I will be happy to share a PDF.
I work with students working across the fields of ethnography and anthropology, the history of science and medicine, and STS. I welcome applications from students with interests in my areas of resaerch. Because I am not always able to respond to student enquiries about our program, I have prepared a short description of the HSS application process. You can read it here.
PhD Stanford University
Critical global global health; place and health; care giving and carework; ethnographic writing; critical and decolonial research methods
- HSOC 010, Health & Societies: Global Perspectives
- HSOC 206 Doing Good: Understanding Humanitarianism & Global Health
- HSOC 421 Medicine and Development
- HSOC 438 Global Health Technologies
- HSSC 667 Capitalism(s) and Biocapitalism(s)
- HSSC 609 Feminist STS
Book:
Medicine in the Meantime: The Work of Care in Mozambique. Duke University Press. 2018
Read the introduction here.
Special issue/section:
The objects of critique in Critical Global Health Studies. Medicine Anthropology Theory. May 2019. With Cal Biruk.
Articles:
- Making Medicines Trustworthy. AllegraLab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism. allegralab.net. September 21. 2022.
- Global health’s durable dreams: Ethnography, “CHWs,” and health without health infrastructures. Africa. 90(1): 95-111. 2020.
- Critical convergences: social science research as global health technology. MAT (Medicine Anthropology Theory). May. 2019.
- Conditions of life in the city: medicine and gendered relations in Maputo JRAI 24(3):1-18. 2018
- The view from the middle: lively relations of care, class, and medical labor in Maputo Critical African Studies 8(3): 278-290. 2016
- Documentary Disorders: Managing Medical Multiplicity in Maputo, Mozambique American Ethnologist 39(3): 545-561. 2012
- Afterlives: Humanitarian Histories and Critical Subjects in Mozambique Cultural Anthropology 27(2): 286-309. 2012
- Ethnography as Political Critique: A review essay. Anthropological Quarterly 85(4): 1209-1228. With João Biehl. 2012.
- Graduate Group, Department of Anthropology
- Graduate Group, Lauder Institute
- Center for Africana Studies, Faculty affiliate