Masthead

Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is a lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Prior to this post, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Her research and teaching areas of interest include: feminist medical anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS); cultural studies and media anthropology; reproductive and contraceptive justice; ethics and governance; regenerative medicine; and ethnographic research methodologies. Her interest in biomedical interventions and burgeoning biotechnologies in contemporary India are reflected in her two key projects. The first of these is on the feminist politics of health and reproduction in liberalizing India and second on the regulatory and ethical implications of emerging stem cell biotechnologies. She is currently working on her book, Emergency Contraception in India: Media, Liberalization, and Reimagined Family Planning, which critically analyze the implications of shifts in the politics of health and reproduction in liberalized India by focusing on pharmaceutical contraceptives and their marketing to women (and men) within neo-liberal and neo-Malthusian frameworks. Her second project, which was part of her post-doctoral research, extends her engagement with bio-medically promoted regenerative medicine and burgeoning biotechnologies. In particular, she is interested in the ‘ethics of governance, and governance of ethics’ around stem cell research and therapies in India.

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Dominique P. Béhague is a social anthropologist and critical health scholar. Her research on Brazilian social psychiatry, adolescent psychopathology, and evidence production in global health is underpinned by an interest in the social, political and material life of marginalized epistemic values and practices. She is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University; Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine at King’s College London; and Honorary Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

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Adia Benton is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone, won the 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, awarded annually by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to the best book in the field of Science and Technology Studies with strong social or political relevance. Her body of work addresses transnational efforts to eliminate health disparities and inequalities, and the role of ideology in global health. In addition to ongoing research on public health responses to epidemics, she has conducted research on the growing movement to fully incorporate surgical care into commonsense notions of “global health.” Her other writing has touched on the politics of anthropological knowledge in the response to the West African Ebola outbreak, racial hierarchies in humanitarianism and development, and techniques of enumeration in gender-based violence programs.

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Ekaterina Borozdina is an Assistant Professor at European University at Saint-Petersburg, Russia. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Analysis and Studies of Technologies, Tomsk State University, Russia. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the Sociological Institute of Russian Academy of Science in 2012 with a study of maternity care reforms in Russia. Her research interests are in sociology of medicine, gender studies, and sociology of care.

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Betsey Brada is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Reed College. Betsey Brada is a cultural anthropologist specializing in health and medicine in southern Africa. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Chicago. She comes to Reed this fall from Princeton University where she taught and mentored students in the interdisciplinary Program in Global Health and Health Policy. Her research and teaching interests include: medical anthropology; the anthropology of pedagogy and expertise; and the ethnography and history of Africa. Her book manuscript in progress argues that global health, rather than a unidirectional flow of moral practice and expert knowledge from North to South, is an imaginative framework that organizes the space, time, and ethics of encounter.

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Mara Buchbinder, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at UNC – Chapel Hill, as well as core faculty in the UNC Center for Bioethics. Dr. Buchbinder is a medical anthropologist with broad interests in cultures of health, illness, and medicine in the United States. Her recent work focuses on how patients, families, and healthcare providers navigate social and ethical challenges resulting from changes in medical technology, law, and health policy. Dr. Buchbinder is the author of Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening(with Stefan Timmermans, 2013, University of Chicago Press) and All in Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain(2015, University of California Press), and the editor of Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: Bridging Perspectives for New Conversations (with Michele Rivkin-Fish and Rebecca Walker, 2016, UNC Press).

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Fanny Chabrol is a Research Fellow at Centre Population et Développement (CEPED), Paris. Her research interests focus on healthcare practices and policies in Subsaharan Africa, African states, global health governance, hospitals, HIV and the management of coinfections and comorbities (viral hepatitis, tuberculosis). Her doctoral research was focused on the national program for access to antiretrovirals and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana. She then undertook a postdoctoral research on the management of viral hepatitis in Cameroon. Building on these previous works she has led another postdoctoral research project under the auspices of the ERC GlobHEALTH that dealt with a tuberculosis hospital in northern Tanzania. In 2018 she received a National Research Agency (ANR) grant to coordinate a multidisciplinary study of a Chinese built hospital just opened in Niamey, Niger. She is the author of Prendre soin de sa population. L’exception botswanaise face au sida, (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 2014).

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Suparna Choudhury is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University and an Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. She did her doctoral research in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, postdoctoral research in transcultural psychiatry at McGill and most recently directed an interdisciplinary research program on critical neuroscience and the developing brain at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. Her current work investigates the production and dissemination of biomedical knowledge – in particular cognitive neuroscience – that shapes the ways in which researchers, clinicians, patients and laypeople understand themselves, their mental health and their illness experiences. Dr. Choudhury’s research focuses primarily on the cases of the adolescent brain, cultural neuroscience and personalized genomic medicine.

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Thomas Cousins is an Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, at the University of Oxford. He studied at the University of Cape Town and Johns Hopkins University, and previously taught at Stellenbosch University. He is an anthropologist of southern Africa with a particular interest in health, labour, and kinship, especially nutrition and pharmaceuticals and their attendant forms of value and life. His fieldwork to date has been in South Africa. His doctoral work (Johns Hopkins, 2012) focused on timber plantation labourers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the substances and concepts of health, strength, and life that are constituted in the production of value. Along with Lindsey Reynolds, Thomas developed Transcriptions – a forum on HIV/AIDS and global health, on Somatosphere.

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Vincent Duclos is Assistant Professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), teaching in Department of social and public communication. He is an anthropologist of medicine, writing about digital health systems and practices. His work is inspired by cultural anthropology, STS, media studies and philosophy of science and technology. He has conducted field research in India and West Africa.

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Lukas Engelmann is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer in History and Sociology of Biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is a historian of medicine and epidemiology. His research covers histories of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and the third plague pandemic (1890-1950), the history of epidemiological reasoning as well as the digital transformation of public health in the present. From January 2021 to December 2025, his work on the history of epidemiological reasoning is funded by an ERC Starting Grant. The project website can be found here. His publications are mostly connected to the broad field of medical humanities and often framed by the relationship of modern history to anthropology.

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Des Fitzgerald is Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at UCC – where he is based at the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and in the Department of Sociology & Criminology. A sociologist by training, he has particular interests in sociologies and histories of the psychological sciences, in social and cultural theory, and in urban studies.  He is the co-author (with Nikolas Rose) of The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City (Princeton UP 2022), author of Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience (U Washington Press 2017), and co-author (with Felicity Callard) of Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences (Palgrave 2015).

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Michele Friedner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research explores deaf and disabled peoples’ social, moral, and economic practices in post-liberalization urban areas of India. She is particularly interested in how deaf people imagine and work towards deaf futures and how disabled people navigate public space and use universalist discourses of accessibility. She is also interested in how disability might be represented, experienced, and perceived as a source of different kinds of social, moral, political, and economic value. She is the author of Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and has also published articles in Antipode, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Anthropology and Education Quarterly.

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Anna Harris pursues an approach to the social study of medicine that is grounded in ethnographic studies of contemporary medical practices, her clinical experience as a doctor, and collaborations with historians, artists, museum specialists and craftspeople. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Technology and Society Studies Department at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Anna’s research broadly concerns the anthropology and history of technological medical practices, with a focus on questions of sensorality and embodiment. Her current project, funded by the European Research Council, is a comparative study of the materiality of learning skills in medicine. She also has an obsession with all things related to pneumatic tubes, which she blogs regularly about.

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Nev Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a community engaged mental health services researcher,  with an interdisciplinary academic background in social and political philosophy (BA, MA, postbaccalaureate fellowship), community psychology (MA, PhD) and medical anthropology (postdoc).  In addition to academic roles she has worked in the NGO sector (in Nepal), in state government and as director of research and evaluation for a large, multi-county social services and mental health agency.    Her research is most often mixed methods and concerned with issues of epistemic justice and structural racism as they play out across the vectors of class, disability, systems involvement and geopolitical positionality.

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Frédéric Keck is a researcher at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (CNRS) in Paris. He has published works on the history of philosophy and social anthropology in France (Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss) and translated Paul Rabinow’s French DNA into French. He now works on the management of animal diseases transmitted to humans, or zoonoses (Un monde grippé, Flammarion, 2010, Des hommes malades des animaux, L’Herne, 2012)

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Janina Kehr is a social anthropologist who specialised in medical anthropology. She works on the politics of time and the moral economy of medicine and public health in contemporay Europe. In 2017, she took up a position as SNSF-Ambizione Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern with a habilitation project on Austerity Medicine in Spain. She therein investigates public health infrastructures and practices of care at the intersection of debt economies, state bureaucracies and peoples’ experiences. She studied Anthropology and Political Sciences at the University of Göttingen and the University of California Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris and the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012. Between 2011 and 2017, she has worked on an interdisciplinary terrain in Medical Humanities as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Zurich. She writes about ongoing research activities – more or less regularly – on her blog “Medical Modernities.”

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Ann H. Kelly is Senior Lecturer in Global Health in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. An anthropologist by training (Cambridge University, 2007), Ann’s ethnographic research has often been intertwined with public health interventions and disease control programmes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. She has addressed a number of substantive topics, from mosquito control programmes in urban and rural contexts to emergency clinical trials during the recent West African Ebola outbreak. Much of her anthropological work has unfolded in close collaboration with bioscientists, disease ecologists, entomologists and clinicians. Ann has drawn on these collaborations to develop a number of conceptual innovations in the social-scientific study of global health, ranging from notions of experimental value, the role of ignorance and memory in the sciences, the disentanglement of human and nonhuman species, or the scales of political participation and the emergence of new global health publics.

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Hanna Kienzler is a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. She has a long-standing academic interest in the field of global health, in connection with organised violence, ethnic conflict, and complex emergencies, and their mental health outcomes. Within this broad field of inquiry, she is particularly interested in the social determinants of health and illness, gender based violence, trauma, PTSD, local idioms of distress, resilience, and local forms of healing as well as in the growing field of human rights and humanitarian and clinical interventions. She conducts research in Kosovo, Palestine, and Nepal.

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Junko Kitanaka teaches anthropology at Keio University in Tokyo. She is the author of Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (Princeton UP, 2012), which received the American Anthropological Association’s Francis Hsu Prize for Best Book in East Asian Anthropology in 2013.

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Emma Kowal is Professor of Anthropology at the Alfred Deakin Institute and Convenor of the Science and Society Network at Deakin University. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who previously worked as a medical doctor and public health researcher in Indigenous health. Much of her work is at the intersection of science and technology studies, postcolonial studies and indigenous studies. Her publications include the monograph Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australiaand the collection (co-edited with Joanna Radin) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Her current book project is entitled Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia.

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Javier Lezaun is James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance and Deputy Director at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. For the past three years he has been directing the program BioProperty, which explores the practices of appropriation and exchange of biomedical research communities. He holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University.

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Stephanie Lloyd is a medical anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Laval University who explores the intersections of scientific and medical technologies and identity formation, with a particular interest in genetics and psychiatric knowledge and practices. Her current ethnography examines the production of epigenetic theories of suicide risk, focusing on efforts to construct distinctive biological profiles of “suicide completers”, shifting temporalities of risk, and the reimagination of the porous nature of human bodies and their interactions with the environment. Her fieldwork is based in Canada and France. Stephanie edits the Foreign Correspondents series for Somatosphere.

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Tomas Matza is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Critical Inquiry, and Social Text. His first book, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia (2018), draws on fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he explored the psychotherapy boom that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Along with Harris Solomon, Tomas developed and curated Commonplaces.

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Ken MacLeish is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. His research, writing, and teaching focus on the biopolitics of contemporary war, the emergence and contestation of war-related diagnostic and injury categories, and the regulation of “disorderly” military life. He is the author of Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty (Princeton University Press, 2013), an award-winning ethnography that shows how the institutional governance of life and death reaches into the most banal and intimate details of everyday life. His current research addresses topics including “post-PTSD” framings of war-related mental illness, toxic exposure in war, the involvement of veterans in the criminolegal system, and the medicalization of mass shootings.

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Gergely Mohácsi is an anthropologist in the School of Human Sciences at Osaka University, Japan. His former research has focused on the embodied entanglements of technoscience and medicine in contemporary Japan, especially in the domain of diabetes care. He conducted fieldwork in hospitals, laboratories and patient groups in Japan and Hungary. Currently, he is investigating the co-constitution of things and values in the development and use of herbal medications in Japan and Southeast Asia. By highlighting the entanglement of various medical traditions, humans, nonhumans and environments in the process of producing new medications, he aims to link methodological questions of multispecies ethnography to the emerging concern with planetary health.

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Cristian R. Montenegro is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. a qualitative health researcher with a background in sociology, community psychology and public health. He is interested in the set of exchanges between health and democracy at the micro (service-user experiences, participation and engagement) and macro-levels (health-related social movements, democratic transitions and health care policy, human rights and grassroots advocacy in health), with a focus on Latin America. He has conducted research on the experiences of caregivers of persons with psychosocial disabilities and their interaction with care providers, service-user and survivor activism in MH, the political and administrative dimensions of community participation in healthcare policy, the sociopolitical contexts of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation and the social and cultural aspects of early intervention in psychosis. He is a founding member of the Platform for Social Research on Mental Health in Latin America (PLASMA).

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Neely Myers (Ph.D., Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, 2009) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in medical and psychiatric anthropology in the United States and Tanzania. Her interests lie at the intersections of anthropology and psychiatry, with a particular focus on how people come to understand, experience, treat, and recover from serious emotional distress and extreme states (often called “madness”) that can cause psychiatric disability. The complex relationships between cultural context, care, and recovery has implications for people living with madness and their caregivers, as well as global mental health initiatives, the anthropology of care, and the anthropology of health/healing/becoming. She is the author of  Recovery’s Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency (Vanderbilt University Press 2015). She has also published 20 peer-reviewed book chapters and articles, including pieces in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Psychiatric Services, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Transcultural Psychiatry, and the Annals of Anthropological Practice.

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Michael J. Oldani, PhD, MS, is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration in the School of Pharmacy at Concordia University Wisconsin. He also is campus-wide Coordinator of Interprofessional Education, a program designed to create team-based learning and training opportunities for students in nursing, pharmacy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, the physician assistant program, and social work. His work has been concerned with three overlapping areas: mental illness, psychiatric prescribing, and pharmaceutical sales and marketing. His recent ethnographic project was included in a special volume of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; his current project involves a pilot mental health court in Wisconsin. Michael is working on a book-length ethnographic manuscript encompassing the blockbuster era of pharmaceutical prescribing in both Canada and the U.S.

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Michelle Pentecost is a is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Global Health at King’s College London. A physician-anthropologist by training, her research and publication record reflects her work and interest across disciplines including clinical medicine, anthropology, science and technology studies, urban studies and global health. Michelle holds a degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town and has a decade of work experience as a clinician in South Africa. She defended her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2017, specialising in the anthropology of postgenomics and global health. She is currently working on a monograph based on this work, provisionally titled The First Thousand Days: Global Health and the Politics of Potential in South Africa.

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Sadeq Rahimi, MSc, PhD, is is a Research Associate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an Adjunct Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

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Lindsey Reynolds is a visiting scholar in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, working at the boundaries of anthropology and public health. Drawing on insights from a decade of work on global health, humanitarian intervention, and the lives of young people and families in rural South Africa, her research interrogates the tensions inherent in processes of social reproduction and social change in the context of global health research and intervention in contemporary South Africa. Her long-term research interests are centered on investigating the social and ethical processes involved in the production of knowledge and implementation of programs and policies in global health. Lindsey completed a joint doctoral degree in 2012 in anthropology and public health at the Johns Hopkins University. Along with Thomas Cousins, Lindsey developed Transcriptions – a forum on HIV/AIDS and global health, on Somatosphere.

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Emilia Sanabria is a French-Colombian anthropologist who specialises in medical anthropology, anthropology of the body, conceptions of health and wellness, drugs and pharmaceuticals and cultures of expertise in global health with a focus on the Global South. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon). Her book Plastic Bodes: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil (Duke, 2016) was awarded the Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize and Diana Forsythe Prize honorable mention. She was recently awarded European Research Council funding for a project titled “Healing Encounters: Reinventing an indigenous medicine in the clinic and beyond.” The grant will study practices of evidence at work in the psychedelic science renaissance and the new therapeutic uses of the psychoactive Amazonian brew ayahuasca.

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Natasha Dow Schüll is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.  Her first book, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton University Press 2012), draws on extended research among compulsive gamblers and the designers of the slot machines they play to explore the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction. Her next book, Keeping Track: Sensor Technology, Self-Regulation, and the Data-Driven Life (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, forthcoming), concerns the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender.

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Aaron Seaman is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. His research interests include how relationality shapes experiences of health and illness; caregiving; family and kinship; aging and the life course; the temporality of health and illness; and how lived experience is shaped by health policy. His work has focused in the US, where he has worked with people living with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, their families, and the medical communities with whom they interact. Aaron received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago in 2016.

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Harris Solomon is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University.   His research examines the intersections between bodies and environments in urban India. He is author of Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India(Duke University Press 2016). Along with Tomas Matza, Harris developed and curated Commonplaces.

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Noah Tamarkin is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research examines how DNA transforms power and politics as it becomes unevenly part of everyday life through technologies like ancestry testing and criminal forensics. His book, Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press 2020), ethnographically examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba people, Black South Africans who were part of Jewish genetic ancestry studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The book asks how the stakes of genetic data change when approached from the perspective of research subjects rather than genetics researchers. His work has also appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, History and Anthropology, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. At Cornell, he teaches courses that explore race and religion; borders and belonging; policing, carcerality and abolition; biology and society; and the temporalities of genetics.

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Janelle S. Taylor is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is is a medical anthropologist, who uses concepts and methods from sociocultural anthropology to study social and cultural aspects of health, illness, and medicine. Her research has been based in North America and has focused on a number of different aspects of medicine including: fetal ultrasound imaging, advance care planning and medical decision-making at the end of life, conceptualizations of “culture” within medical education, the use of “Standardized Patient” simulations to teach clinical skills to medical students, and more. Recently, most of her research has focused on aspects of dementia, including: practices of recognition and caring; exclusion of people with dementia from geriatrics research; and friendship in the face of dementia. She has worked with physician colleagues on mixed-methods health research concerning advance care planning and medical decision making, and is currently writing up findings from recent NIA-funded research exploring the situation of older adults with dementia who do not have a living spouse or children. Taylor is the author of a prizewinning scholarly book, co-editor of a scholarly volume, and author or co-author of numerous articles appearing in journals of medicine and medical education as well as medical anthropology and cultural anthropology. A thread running through all of her research is a concern to document and understand how ideas, words and images have material force in the world; how “persons” are socially made (and unmade); and how medicine and health care are involved in all of this.

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Livia Velpry is a medical sociologist in the Department of Sociology in the University of Paris VIII. She is author of Le quotidien de la psychiatrie. Sociologie de la maladie mentale (Armand Colin, 2008).

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Ian Whitmarsh is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. His research focuses on biomedical links made between desire and suffering and the ethics and aesthetics of being healthy. His anthropological interests are in ties between anthropology and psychoanalysis; formations of ethnicity; resonances between “religious” and “secular” techniques; and Claude Levi-Strauss. His recent articles have drawn on Lacan to write about the idea of American race science as a “cathartic science”; Gregory Bateson to explore compliance techniques as a “medical schismogenics”; and Claude Levi-Strauss to explore the “environment” as a supplementarity in gene-environment research. He is Director of the UCSF side of the joint-UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco PhD. Program in Medical Anthropology.

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Matthew Wolf-Meyer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Binghamptom University. His work focuses on medicine, science and media in the United States to make sense of major modern-era shifts in the expert practices of science and medicine and popular representations of health. His book The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life was the first book-length social scientific study of sleep in the United States. It offers insights into the complex lived realities of disorderly sleepers, the long history of sleep science, and the global impacts of the exportation of American sleep. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the alternative histories of American neuroscience, seen through the lens of neurological disorders, tentatively titled The Other Century of the Brain: Disability, Neuroscience and the Politics of American Care. He is in the beginning stages of a project entitled The Colony Within on the history and contemporary medicalization of digestion and excretion in the U.S.

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Emily Yates-Doerr is an assistant professor at Oregon State University and a tenured faculty member at the University of Amsterdam. She is running the ERC research project, Global Future Health, which studies the intersecting domains of health and development through multi-sited ethnography of a maternal-child nutrition initiative. Her previous research examined the emergence of obesity as a diagnostic category in Guatemala. With Christine Labuski, she edited the Somatosphere series, “The Ethnographic Case,” which has recently become transformed into an experimental public-review book, published open-access with Mattering Press. She is is an Associate Editor of Somatosphere.

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Jason Alley brings overlapping interests in anthropology, film and cultural studies to his research and writing. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Ekaterina Anderson is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. She plans to conduct research on how the cultural competence movement and mental health care reform in Israel jointly affect everyday experiences, practices, and decisions in clinical settings.

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Kalman Applbaum teaches medical anthropology and global studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research has concerned the marketing, prescribing and use of psychiatric medicines in the US and Japan.

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Whitney Arey is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Brown University. Her M.A. research examined NGO tuberculosis (TB) case detection projects in the Central Region of Ghana, considering the ways that social relationships are created in state attempts to find, enroll, and surveil TB patients. Her current doctoral work focuses on abortion access in North Carolina, connecting ideas of gender, kinship, and public health. Her project specifically focuses on the role of patient’s companions at the abortion clinic, and asks how interpersonal relationships affect the abortion experience within the politically contested abortion clinic space.

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Sultana Banulescu is a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She holds an MA degree in History of Science from Princeton University, an MS degree in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Iowa, an MD degree from Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, Romania, and a BS degree in Biochemistry from the University of Bucharest. Sultana’s dissertation explores the political, religious, and artistic dynamics of Italian psychoanalysis between 1908 and 1948. Her research interests include modern European history, cultural and intellectual history, history of science and medicine, and medical humanities.

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Sara Bergstresser is a medical and cultural anthropologist, and her research addresses the intersection of health and society, including mental health policy and stigma, global bioethics, disability studies, and religion and health. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Brown University and an MPH from Harvard University.

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Lara Braff received her PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development in 2010. She is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD. Her ethnographic research examines the cultural implications and lived experiences of globalized biosciences – namely, assisted reproductive technologies and genetic sciences – in Mexico. Her broader research interests include the anthropologies of medicine/health, science/technology, gender/kinship, personhood, and the body.

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Melanie Boeckmann is a postdoctoral researcher in Public Health at the Institute of General Practice, Medical Faculty of the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf in Germany. She is currently working on tobacco cessation with tuberculosis patients in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. In addition, Melanie is researching vulnerability, structural and behavioral interventions, and environmental health.

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Basak Can is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation tracked the relationship between political violence and its scientific bureaucratic inscriptions in Turkey.

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Leo Coleman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. His research focuses on energy politics, law, and interactions between people, material things, and political ideals in contexts of change, particularly examining electrification and urban life in twentieth-century India, and contemporary environmental politics in Scotland.  He is the author of the author of A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell University Press, 2017), editor of Food: Ethnographic Encounters (Berg, 2011), the author of several articles on urbanism and infrastructure, and a contributor to the Companion to the Anthropology of India, the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Solitude, and the volume Regimes of Ignorance (Berghahn Books).

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Greg Clinton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University. His dissertation focuses on the architecture of safety, including the cultural and political significance of survival shelters, safe homes, and clean rooms. His work links medical and environmental humanities, literary theory, disability studies, and critical theories of space and place. Greg has lived, taught, and studied in the Midwestern U.S. as well as various locations in Egypt, Belgium, Japan, Sudan, India, and now, Long Island. Greg is the Managing Editor of Somatosphere.

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Amy Cooper is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Louis University. Her research interests include medicine, the body, mental health and psychiatry, homelessness, and aging; the anthropological study of citizenship and political activism; and Latin American and Caribbean studies. Her research focuses on the relationships between political ideologies, public health systems, and local formulations of bodies, medicine, and subjectivity. She has conducted ethnographic research on these topics in urban Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States. Amy received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development in 2012.

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Matthew Dalstrom is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rockford College. In 2010 he received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research and teaching interests include medical anthropology, applied anthropology, medical tourism, and health disparities. Currently, he is working on two projects. Along the US/Mexico border he is researching American retirees who travel to Mexico for health care and the impact that it has on their health. In addition, he is working on a collaborative project with the Winnebago County Health Department to improve access and usage of prenatal health care in Rockford, IL.

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Talia Dan-Cohen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work concerns the intersection of engineering and biology in the field of synthetic biology. Her interests include epistemology and the anthropology of knowledge, technical expertise, rationalities and aesthetics, and the explorations — empirical and theoretical — of problems in the philosophy of science.

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Deanna Day is a writer, editor, and historian of medicine and technology. Her research focuses on the history of consumer technologies and the ways they enable users to understand their bodies and identities. She received her PhD in history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, where she wrote her dissertation on the history of the thermometer and women’s domestic medical labor. She is currently a John C. Haas Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

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Maria Cecilia Dedios is a PhD student in Social and Cultural Psychology at the LSE. She holds an M.A. in the Social Sciences with concentration in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago. Her doctoral work focuses on the intersubjective, social, and cultural processes fostering resilience among vulnerable youth in Colombia and the United Kingdom. Maria Cecilia has conducted research on moral development and identity formation among indigenous children in Perú, Afro-descendants and internally displaced young adults in Colombia, and undocumented young adults in the U.S.

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Livia Garofalo is a PhD/MPH candidate in cultural and medical anthropology at Northwestern University. Her research interests revolve around the formation of subjectivity after trauma and injury, epistemologies of the mind and brain, and their relation to care and the state. Her dissertation research, examines how lay and expert framings of risk, culpability, and “brain health” converge in the understanding of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in public hospitals in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Paul Wenzel Geissler teaches social anthropology at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, and the London School of Hygiene. His research explores the practice of scientific research and collaboration in Africa, combining ethnography and history. His most recent books are the monograph The Land is Dying (2010; with Ruth Prince), and Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: the anthropology and history of medical research in Africa (2011; edited with Sassy Molyneux).

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Hannah Gibson holds her BA (Hons) in Social Anthropology and Spanish from Massey University, New Zealand, and is now working at Victoria University where she is preparing to complete her Masters in 2016, with a focus on medical anthropology and the anthropology of reproduction, specifically gestational surrogacy in a New Zealand context. Previous research includes fieldwork at an equine assisted psychotherapy organisation and research on the anthropological engagement with the Anthropocene and human-animal relationships.

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Danya Glabau is the Founder of Implosion Labs, an ethnography-driven research group, Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and an Adjunct Instructor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Cornell University. Her current book project investigates how United States food allergy advocacy reinforces the nuclear family as a site in which gender, race, and capitalism are maintained and reproduced.

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Emily Goldsher-Diamond is an MA student in the Media, Culture & Communication department at New York University. Her research interests include medical anthropology and science studies as they relate to the issues of prosthetics, enhancement technology and organ transfer. She is an Associate Editor at literary culture site Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Emily plans to pursue her PhD in Medical Anthropology, STS or a related interdisciplinary field.

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Talia Gordon is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, who also holds an MA in medical anthropology from Wayne State University. Talia’s work broadly explores how therapeutic paradigms shape individual and collective experience in the US. They are currently working on a dissertation project about crisis and collective life in the post-welfare United States. They are also managing editor at Somatosphere.

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Cinzia Greco is a Newton International Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. After obtaining degrees in Italian Literature (University of Lecce-Salento), Cultural Anthropology (University of Bologna) and Gender Studies (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), she obtained a PhD in Health, Population and Social Policies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 2016. Her PhD research focused on post-mastectomy breast reconstruction and cosmetic surgery of the breast, and she has in particular explored the experiences and visions that patients and medical professionals have of these surgical procedures in France and Italy. Her work is situated at the intersection of medical anthropology, gender studies and the contemporary history of medicine. Her current research focuses on the recent history of metastatic breast cancer.

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Gabrielle Hanley-Mott is a doctoral student in Medical Anthropology at SUNY Binghamton. Her research is interested in the sensorial experience of acquired and traumatic disabilities, how acquired disabilities alter individuals’ relationships to society and themselves, and the role of technology in these experiences and relationships.

Helena Hansen, MD, PhD is Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor and Chair of Research Theme in Translational Social Science and Health Equity, as well as Associate Director of the Center for Social Medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. She has published widely in clinical and social science journals ranging from JAMA and NEJM to Social Science and Medicine and Medical Anthropology, on faith healing of addiction in Puerto Rico, psychiatric disability under welfare reform, opioids and race, ethnic marketing of pharmaceuticals, and structural competency. She is author of Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries (University of California Press 2018).

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Cassandra Hartblay (PhD UNC-Chapel Hill) is a postdoctoral fellow for the University of California Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (CoLED), housed in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego. Her research investigates disability and globalization with a regional focus on the former Soviet Union.

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Anika Jugović Spajić is a PhD student of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests focus on the neoliberal/postsocialist transformation of healthcare in Serbia. She aims to explore the formation of specific forms of socialities among activist patients with non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, and to examine their position in the larger network of the hybrid public-private healthcare system.

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Klaartje Klaver is a PhD student at Tilburg University studying attentiveness and the ethics of care.

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Erin Koch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her research and teaching interests include anthropological studies of medicine, science and technology; infectious disease; humanitarianism; postsocialism; and anthropological theories and methods. She is the author of Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Epidemics in post-Soviet Georgia (Vaderbilt 2013) which examins the effects of Soviet collapse on tuberculosis and responses to tuberculosis in Georgia, and what counts as expert knowledge in the face of WHO-directed biomedical standardization. Her current research in Georgia investigates health effects of displacement and humanitarian interventions. She is interested in how health care, policy and aid organizations produce moral claims to organize institutions, social spaces, and diagnoses as they bring relief—and distress—to displaced populations. Erin’s subsequent project will examine Georgian scientific innovation in the use of bacteriophage treatments to combat bacterial infections in humans. This research will investigate how infectious diseases and responses to them are produced through dynamic human-microbe relationships in which moral claims about infected populations, national health care systems, global health policies, and the commodification and regulation of living entities (viruses) as antibacterial agents are contested and negotiated.

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Julia Kowalski is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at North Dakota State University; beginning in autumn 2018 she will be an assistant professor of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research examines gender, kinship and transnational rights discourse in India and in the United States, using methods from cultural, linguistic and medical anthropology. Her current research explores how family counselors in Rajasthan draw together and transform arguments about rights, kinship, and violence as they confront gendered harm in north India. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.

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Moira Kyweluk is a PhD candidate in Northwestern University’s joint PhD/Masters in Public Health Program in Medical Anthropology. Her research interests include reproduction in the global North, infertility, and assisted reproduction, biomedical testing and screening and critical feminist medical anthropology.

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Christine Labuski is an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech, where she co-directs the Gender, Bodies & Technology conference and initiative. A former nurse practitioner, she is interested in the bodily accumulation of experience, with a particular focus on sex and gender as dynamic and evolving categories. Her ethnography It Hurts Down There: The Bodily Imaginaries of Female Genital Pain (SUNY Press 2015), draws on fieldwork with vulvar pain patients to call for new feminist analyses of contemporary genital discourse and practice. Her current research examines female bodily comportment and gendered asymmetries in and around the Bakken oil fields in northwestern North Dakota.

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Elizabeth Lewis is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on shifting conceptions of disability, particularly deafblindness and multiple disabilities. She is particularly interested in the intersections of medical anthropology, affect, and disability studies, and her current research probes how dynamic realities of disability unfold in everyday life. She has conducted ethnographic research in Guatemala and Nicaragua, as well as in the U.S.

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Nadine Levin recently completed an NSF Postdoc at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, where she wrote a book called Metabolizing Data.  This was part of a two-year project called “What is metabolism after big data?”, which explored how the rise of data, bioinformatics, and statistics is impacting how researchers think about metabolism, and develop metabolic diagnostics and therapies. Previously, she completed work at the University of Exeter on the Open Science movement (on the concepts and practical implications of the “openness” of papers, data, software, etc. in biology).

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Martha Lincoln is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. Since 2008, Lincoln has conducted field research in Vietnam, with projects supported by the Social Science Research Council and IIE Fulbright. She has published research on Hanoi’s informal sector, stratification and deregulation in health care provision, the ghosts of war, alcohol use and drinking cultures, the redefinition of poverty under late socialism, and urban cholera outbreaks. She is author of Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam: Public Health and the State (Bloomsbury 2021).

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Kathleen Lynch graduated from Boston University School of Medicine with an MS in Medical Anthropology in May 2016. Her masters thesis focused on inter-generational conceptions of place and place-making among Boston’s urban Indigenous community, and its implications for well-being. She currently works as an Associate at Healthcare Innovation Technology Lab (HITLAB) in New York City, an organization that evaluates the development, feasibility, and implementation of emerging digital health technologies. Kathleen hopes to pursue a PhD in medical anthropology, where she plans to further explore the themes of place-making and embodiment through the lens of sport and injury. During her free time, Kathleen enjoys practicing Taekwondo and exploring New York City.

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Zhiying Ma is a PhD candidate in the Departments of Anthropology and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines the politics and ethics of care surrounding psychiatry and mental health law reform in contemporary China.

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Francis Mckay is a Joint PhD Candidate in Anthropology and the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. His focus is on the science and politics of well-being in the United States, and how the concept of well-being is reconfiguring the notion of biopower in the twenty-first century. His ethnographic research focuses specifically on mindfulness practices in the U.S. and the UK, and situates that more broadly withing other “happiness sciences” that have emerged over the past decades: contemplative studies, positive and hedonic psychology, and the economics of happiness. Other interests include science and religion, continental philosophy of science, psychological and medical anthropology, and STS.

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Seth Messinger is a researcher with the Center for Rehabilitation Sciences Research at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 2003, and from 2002 – 2004 held an NIMH funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His research interests include the anthropology of biomedicine and psychiatry, trauma, memory, and history. Seth is the Book Reviews Editor for Somatosphere.

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Todd Meyers was trained in anthropology and public health science at Johns Hopkins University and studied studio arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine and teaches courses in McGill University’s Department of Anthropology. Professor Meyers is the author of All That Was Not Her (Duke University Press, 2022), Chroniques de la maladie chronique (Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), Violence’s Fabled Experiment (with Richard Baxstrom, Walther König/ August Verlag, 2018), The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (with Stefanos Geroulanos, University of Chicago Press, 2018), Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible (with Richard Baxstrom, Fordham University Press, 2016), The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy (U Washington Press, 2013) and (with Stefanos Geroulanos) Experimente im Individuum: Kurt Goldstein und die Frage des Organismus (Berlin: August Verlag, 2013). Todd co-edits the Forms of Living book series at Fordham University Press and was an Associate Editor of Somatosphere.

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Elle Nurmi finished her Masters degree in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 2013 and now works as an analyst. Her major research interests include mental illness and conceptions of violence in the internet age, as well as gender politics in modern Eastern Europe.

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Branwyn Poleykett is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD project “Intimacy, Technoscience and the City: regulating “prostitution” in Dakar, 1946-2010 traced the history of the sanitary regulation of prostitution across the twentieth century as it moved into the clinical spaces and worlds of practice of experimental virologists and urban development professionals.

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Kane Race is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. In much of his research, he has tracked the ways in which antiretroviral therapies have been redefining the terms of gay sexual and social life in Australia and comparable western contexts. He is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (Duke UP, 2009) which critically examines how discourses of drug use (from medications to illicit drugs) have become moralized in neoliberal contexts, and develops a frame of ‘counterpublic health’ to address this process. He is currently engaged in research on how people come to confront themselves as subjects of illicit sexuality and risk (or not), a question whose significance is newly materializing in the context of HIV biomedical prevention initiatives.

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Eugene Raikhel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. A medical and cultural anthropologist by training, he is particularly interested in the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. He is author of Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic (Cornell University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with William Garriott) of Addiction Trajectories (Duke UP, 2013). Eugene was the founder and Editor of Somatosphere from 2008 to 2023.

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Georgia Richardson-Melody completed a master’s degree in the Anthropology department at Wayne State University, with a concentration in Medical Anthropology.

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Jane Roberts holds an MSc in medical anthropology from University College London and is currently a PhD candidate in social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is concerned with how knowledge about contested and controversial diagnoses in children’s mental health is constituted, communicated and circulated within and between different groups in contrasting cultural contexts, using as a case study the diagnosis of paediatric bipolar disorder (as represented by Pharma, psychiatrists and parents) in the US as compared to England.

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Andrés Romero is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Wayne State University and he holds a position as an external investigator at the Institute of Colombian Anthropology and History (ICANH). His research interests include the anthropology of the senses, affect, memory, and the experience of place of in relation to violence and displacement in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Silvia Rossi is a PhD student in Italian Literature at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Her PhD project focuses on the connection between writing and sickness in autobiographies of people suffering from cancer. She works for the website cancercontribution.fr

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Christine Sargent is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is interested in cross-cultural constructions of disability and how global discourses of disability rights interact with local norms surrounding difference, impairment, and vulnerability. Her dissertation explores the moral uncertainties and new technologies of selfhood, kinship, and care generated by emerging vocabularies of Down Syndrome and intellectual disability in Amman, Jordan.

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Aaron Seaman is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. His research interests include how relationality shapes experiences of health and illness; caregiving; family and kinship; aging and the life course; the temporality of health and illness; and how lived experience is shaped by health policy. His work has focused in the US, where he has worked with people living with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, their families, and the medical communities with whom they interact. Aaron received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago in 2016.

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Lily Shapiro is a graduate student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle with a focus on medical anthropology and South Asian Studies. Her research concerns factory accidents and reconstructive plastic surgery in South India; through this lens she is interested in exploring the body, occupational health, labor, and the globalization of medical expertise and technologies.

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Nick Shapiro is the Matter, Materials, and Culture Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Open Air Fellow at Public Lab. His work revolves around the politics, poetics and logics of uneventful human harm in the United States as understood through case studies of chronic chemical exposure. He is a co-founder of EDGI, where he serves as the Co-Chair, as well as a core collaborator on the Aerocene project.

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Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University, has published widely on caste, performance, and religion in India. He is currently working on two projects. First, he is interested to understand how culture-specific absorptive experiences, achievement motivations, and social interactions contribute to virtual worlds’ therapeutic and addictive dimensions. This research has begun with primarily U.S. gamers with plans to extend the project to France and India. Second, in NSF-funded research, he is working to understand how loss of access to forest spaces and resources – for example, through deforestation and displacement from a newly established wildlife preserve in central India – impact indigenous peoples’ health and systems of healing. He hopes empirical results from these and other projects will help him fuse insights from cultural psychiatry and neuroscience into more synthetic “biopsychocultural” accounts of mental health resilience.

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Ann Marie Thornburg is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at University of Notre Dame. Her current project is a multispecies ethnography examining the care and management of dogs in Bali, Indonesia. Ann Marie also holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.

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Katie Vizenor is a PhD candidate in the Anthropology department at the University at Buffalo. Her dissertation research examines disability community formation and maintenance in virtual worlds. She holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science from the University of Maryland-College Park. As an Informationist and Researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, she advised public health graduate students and faculty on effective uses of information technology to improve their evidence-based practices. She also researched the use of peer reviewed literature by public health workers and proposed strategies to improve access, education and training as part of an National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded project. From 2002-2004, she was a Research Assistant at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Leipzig, Germany.

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Katherine Warren is an MD-PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University whose work focuses on the anthropology of addiction, suicide, and mental health in the United States.

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Keahnan Washington is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Keahnan has a background in public health as well as biochemistry and molecular biology, and his primary interest is the alleviation of health disparities and health inequality.

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Yu-chuan Wu is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. A formal psychiatrist, he is interested in the history of psychiatry and psychology in East Asia. He has published works on the history of neurasthenia and the history of hypnotism in Japan in the early twentieth century.

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Anna Zogas is a cultural anthropologist specializing in health and medicine in the United States. She received her Ph.D. in 2018 from the University of Washington. Her research and teaching interests include institutions, knowledge and expertise, disability, the US military, and the VA health care system. Her first book project is an ethnography of mild traumatic brain injury (TBI), a politically symbolic injury affecting American combat veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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