Ramah McKay

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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 research. 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.