Academic & Research Profile

As a medical and psychological anthropologist, I study the cultural dimensions and subjective experiences of illness, well-being, and healing. I am particularly interested in how people experience, understand, and derive meaning from misfortune, uncertainty, and illness. My work integrates individual experiences with the complexities of people's broader structural, political-economic, biological, and historical contexts.

My research and teaching encompass the following domains:

• Sociocultural, medical, and psychological anthropology
• Global health and development studies
• Spirit children and infanticide discourse and practice
• Childhood, the life course, and aging
• Family and intergenerational relations
• Mental health and historical and intergenerational trauma
• Misfortune, meaning, and disorder
• Risk, uncertainty, and decision-making
• Divination practices
• I am comfortable working within phenomenological, symbolic/interpretive, narrative, critical (political-economic and political-ecological), and psychodynamic methods and theories.
• Design thinking and research as a form of applied anthropology.
• Regional specialties include Ghana, Burkina Faso (and West Africa generally), North America (including First Nations peoples), and Australia.

Please visit my webpage linked below for updated details on my research, links to my publications, and a list of my previous and ongoing projects.

 For Future Students

I am interested in supervising students (MDS, MRes, and PhD) with a background in anthropology that are committed to theoretically sophisticated ethnographic research in the areas of sociocultural, medical, and psychological anthropology. Please review my interests and supervision information on the webpage linked below.

Click here for further information, blog posts, and publications