
Assistant Professor
Education
Ph.D Stanford University
Trained as a socio-cultural and medical anthropologist, my research focuses on the politics of health in Mozambique. My first book, Medicine in the Meantime: The work of care in Mozambique (2018), traces 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.
My ongoing research in and beyond Mozambique focuses on the making of transnational medical economies between Africa and India, and on the forms of knowledge production that they entail.
These interests also inform my teaching, which focuses on NGOs, humanitarianism and global health; health and healing in Africa; health, development, and environment; and transnational medicine.
Research Interests
Critical global health; humanitarianism and development; history and temporality; the anthropology of biomedicine; material approaches to medical anthropology
Selected Work
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:
- 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 278-290. 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.
**If you are unable to access any of my articles, please email me at rmckay@sas.upenn.edu -- I will be happy to share a PDF.
Affiliations
- Graduate Group in Anthropology
- Center for Africana Studies, Faculty affiliate
Teaching Fields
- Global Health
- History and anthropology of humanitarianism
- Critical approaches to development / Medicine and development
- Political economy of health and medicine
Courses Taught
- 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