Macquarie University

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Lecturer

About

Affiliations: 
-Lecturer, Dept. of Anthropology, Macquarie University
-Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, Northern Arizona University
-Fellow, American Psychoanalytic Association (Fellowship Program)

Interests: 
Child and maternal health; infanticide discourse, representation, and practice; development and health; divination and meaning-making; childhood and intergenerational relations; mental health; psychoanalysis; historical/intergenerational trauma; resilience; and, electronic health records and patient-provider relational styles.  West Africa (specifically, Northern Ghana/Volta Basin); Native North America; and, biomedical clinics in North America. 

Projects: 
My on-going research addresses infanticide discourse and practice in Northern Ghana (the spirit child phenomenon).  This project has also taken me into various related topics such as studying divination and meaning-making practices, health and development projects, humanitarian engineering programs (Engineers without Borders and the intersection of applied anthropology and engineering), and population health. 

My most recent work on infanticide is directed towards developing a broader set of frameworks to think about and theorize infanticide practices—moving beyond the experience-distant, rational choice and economic models that scholars too frequently apply.  I am also concerned with the frequent misrepresentations of infanticide in the literature and media. 

I am currently involved in a project examining biomedical provider relational styles in the context of electronic health records (EHR).  Specifically, how EHR systems—the “third” agent in the exam room—shape how providers communicate with and respond to patient needs, particularly within a clinic working from a strong patient-centered care paradigm.

My future project interests include the emergence of psychoanalytic training and practice in China.  My earlier research concerns intergenerational identity and historical trauma and culture and mental health. 

A Perspective: 
As a medical, psychological, and sociocultural anthropologist, I am concerned with the complexities of the human experience of illness, misfortune, and healing as situated within their broader political-economic, biological, and historical contexts.  I am particularly interested in the relationships between domains—such as the social and psychodynamic or the interplay between people’s perceptions of the “global” and “local”—as an analytic method to avoid reducing experience, sickness, and decision-making to purely internal essences or external circumstances.  My research into maternal and child health, disability, and family misfortune in Northern Ghana emphasizes the significance of attending to “critical events” in the lives of individuals, families, and communities.  Attention to critical events reveals how interacting forces coalesce and shape subjectivity, patterns and causes, personal and social implications, and the moral imagination within the structural and (often post-colonial) historical dynamics that shape sickness and well-being.  Accordingly, this approach offers insight into what is significant or “at stake” for families and establishes how individuals and communities shape notions of health and normality within the larger contexts of poverty, ethnicity, gender, and inequality.  This research explores the relationship between the local and international discourses concerning illness and abnormality, family practices, and biological and structural imperatives.  I also consider how narratives mediate these relationships. 

Teaching
Undergraduate Classes Taught: 
Exploring Cultures (Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology)
Medical Anthropology
Anthropology of Health & Healing
Identity and Difference
Ethnicity, Migration, & Nationalism
Economic Anthropology
Essential Skills for Sustainable Development
Anthropological History & Theory

Graduate Seminars and Classes:
Medical Anthropology
Culture, Health, & Disease
Anthropological Theory

Contact Information