In line with our commitment to the development of an innovative, dynamic, and sustainable model for open access academic publishing, the journal will be edited by an institutional collective rather than a single individual. This will optimise the huge range of expertise, energy, and enthusiasm our co-editors exhibit; reduce the administrative burden on any one individual; ensure continuity in the case of members of the collective taking extended leave or taking up employment elsewhere (thus enabling members to take parental or sick leave and return to their editorial positions); and distribute editorial control to better safeguard our publishing ethics policies.
Members of the editorial collective will be responsible for the overall direction and management of the project, take a hands-on editorial role for a proportion of article submissions, contribute reviews, attend monthly editorial meetings, and promote the journal through their academic networks.
The collective coordinator, a role that rotates between collective members, will ensure there is a single point of contact for urgent issues, staffing, and communications. The current collective coordinator is Jessica Cooper.
Jessica Cooper, collective coordinator
University of Edinburgh
Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at sites of criminal justice reform, mental health clinics, and homeless encampments in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica’s research explores connections and disjunctures between systems of inequality, care, and social justice. Her first book project, Unaccountable: Surreal Life in California’s Mental Health Courts, reveals the ways in which relationships between criminal justice professionals and their clients unravel state power by inhabiting care as an alternative to the individualising discourse of liberal responsibility. Drawing on observations of and participation in relationships among staff, clients, and clients’ families in mental health courts, Unaccountable explores emergent ethics elicited by the demand to provide care for mentally ill individuals as a project of social justice amid absent state services and vast material inequalities. Jessica has a PhD in anthropology from Princeton.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/jessica_cooper
Laurie Denyer-Willis
University of Edinburgh
Laurie uses a multimodal approach to ethnography to explore the relationships between the sensory lives of bodies, suburban environments, religion, and global health. Her first book project, A Politics of Grace, is based on long-term engagement in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is part of the Atelier Series at the University of California Press. In the manuscript, she uses graphic art to attend to the entanglements of bodies, pollutants and suburban infrastructures, tracing how Evangelicalism, race, and the senses come to matter in the construction of new kinds of political space. Over the past few years, she has been working with anthropologists in Kampala, Uganda and Bangkok, Thailand, as part of the collective project Antimicrobials In Society (AMIS) at LSHTM. Here, her work considers antimicrobial resistance, food systems, and the politics of AMR policy (both its design and implementation). Laurie competed her PhD in Medical Anthropology at McGill in 2018, and her MSc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Urban Studies and Planning.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/laurie_denyer_willis
Lukas Engelmann
University of Edinburgh
Lukas is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the history and sociology of biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. His work is concerned with the history of epidemiology in the 20th century and aims to engage contemporary concerns in digital health. He received his PhD in history at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Before arriving in Edinburgh in 2017, Lukas worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Zurich (2013) and as a research fellow in Christos Lynteris’s ERC project Visual Plague at CRASSH, University of Cambridge (2014–2017). He is the author of Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which is based on his doctoral research on the visual medical history of HIV/AIDS, and the co-author of Sulfuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation, which is concerned with the technological and political history of fumigation and maritime sanitation at the turn of the 20th century.
http://www.stis.ed.ac.uk/people/academic_staff/lukas_engelmann
Ian Harper
University of Edinburgh
Ian is a trained medical practitioner who has worked in hospital medicine and general practice in the UK. For three and a half years, he managed a tuberculosis control project in Nepal, and for two years he worked with NGOs throughout India to support community health programmes. His experiences of practising medicine and public health in diverse cultural and political situations led him to study medical anthropology. Ian’s research has addressed the social relations around public health programmes in Nepal and the privatisation of healthcare, training, pharmaceuticals, and maternal and child healthcare in international development. Most recently, he has worked on the impact of global health funding and organisational structures on TB control.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/ian_harper
Lucy Lowe
University of Edinburgh
Lucy’s research addresses issues of sexual and reproductive health, motherhood, gender, migration and displacement, and reproductive justice. Her research has taken place in Somalia, Kenya, and Scotland, and explores how women’s experiences of forced migration shape and are shaped by their reproductive capacities and individual decisions. She recently began an ESRC GCRF-funded project on improving healthcare at the intersection of gender and protracted displacement among Somali and Congolese refugees and IDPs in Somalia, Kenya, DRC, and South Africa. She is beginning a new project on reproductive health among asylum-seeking and refugee women in Scotland.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/lucy_lowe
Nichola Khan
University of Edinburgh
Nichola is Professor of Human Geography and Ethnography, and an interdisciplinary ethnographer working across social and medical anthropology, human geography, migration research, and psychosocial/psychoanalysis. Her research has been concerned with urban violence among Pakistan’s Urdu-speaking migrant communities in Karachi, mobilities and refugee migration from Afghanistan, and migrant health and mental health- more recently with asylum seekers receiving hospital-based medical and psychiatric care in Paris, where she was an International Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations in Aubervilliers (2020-23). She has published a number of books: ‘Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan’ (2010, 2012, Routledge); ‘Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi’ (2017 ed., Oxford University Press; Hurst & Co.); 'Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights (2017, University of Toronto Press); ‘Arc of the Journeyman: Afghan Migrants in England’ (2020, University of Minnesota Press); and 'The Breath of Empire' (2023, Studies in Literary Anthropology series, Palgrave Macmillan). She has held visiting Scholarships at the National University of Singapore (2017) and Harvard Medical School (2020), and is a Trustee and Council member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/nichola-khan
Ayaz Qureshi
University of Edinburgh
Ayaz has carried out ethnographic fieldwork on HIV/AIDS control in Pakistan. He received his PhD in social anthropology from SOAS. He has been part of a number of research projects in the areas of infectious diseases, reproductive and sexual health, and the status of women in Pakistan. His research interests include sexual and reproductive health, NGOs, bureaucracy, healthcare systems, and neoliberalisation and labour relations. He has published articles in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Development and Change, Anthropology & Medicine, and Global Public Health. His monograph, AIDS in Pakistan: Bureaucracy, Public Goods and NGOs, is the first full-length study of HIV/AIDS work in relation to government and NGOs, and encourages readers to reconsider the orthodoxy of policies regarding public–private partnership by critiquing the resulting changes in bureaucracies, civil society, and public goods.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/ayaz_qureshi
Kaveri Qureshi
University of Edinburgh
Kaveri has an interdisciplinary background in sociology, anthropology, and public health. She works on health and social inequalities in the UK and Pakistan, with a focus on migration, ‘race’/ethnicity, gender, and the management of health and illness in families. She also has a growing interest in areas where the medical and the legal coincide. Her work is threaded by a concern with intersectional inequalities and the social determinants of health and gender violence. Her major projects to date have addressed ‘racial’/ethnic and class-based inequalities in non-communicable disease and their impoverishing effects in the context of UK welfare reform; marital conflicts and mental illness associated with gender violence among South Asian migrants and minorities in the UK; and intersectional inequalities in maternal and child health in Pakistan.
http://www.socialpolicy.ed.ac.uk/people/academic_staff/kaveri_qureshi
Lotte Buch Segal
University of Edinburgh
Lotte’s research addresses issues of violence, kinship, subjectivity, affect, trauma, and the methodological challenges of doing ethnographic research in zones of conflict. Her first book No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine is an ethnographic monograph about the porous boundary between endurance and exhaustion and, importantly, how kinship is the site per se in which such exhaustion is felt. She is interested in methodological and ethical questions of how to do ethnography among people in precarious situations. She has worked closely with NGOs and academic colleagues in Palestine. In Denmark, she has co-operated with the Danish Institute against Torture (DIGNITY) for more than 15 years. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the PI of a NOS-HS-funded comparative study, ‘Slippery Suffering’, on the Scandinavian welfare states and how they encounter Middle Eastern survivors of violence.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/lotte_buch_segal
Alice Street
University of Edinburgh
Alice’s research addresses issues of health system strengthening, global health technologies, hospital ethnography, state building, and the social life of diagnosis. Her first book, Biomedicine in an Unstable Place: Infrastructure and Personhood in a Papua New Guinean Hospital (Duke University Press, 2014) was an ethnography of a public hospital in Papua New Guinea which explored the ways in which people engage with biomedical technologies in conditions of uncertainty and precariousness. More recently, her research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and the ESRC, has focused on health systems strengthening, health management, and off-grid health infrastructures. She is currently PI of a European Research Council-funded project on diagnostic devices in global health. The DiaDev project explores the emergent role that point-of-care diagnostic devices are playing in the transformation of global health partnerships and national health systems in low- and middle-income countries. She has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her research has taken place in Papua New Guinea, India, and Sierra Leone.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/people/faculty/alice_street
Marlee Tichenor
University of Edinburgh
Marlee is a Chancellor’s Fellow in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh whose research investigates the politics of evidence and data in health policy and interventions, as well as the logics of global health governance. She received her PhD in medical anthropology from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. Before starting her Chancellor’s Fellowship in 2023, Marlee worked as a research fellow with Devi Sridhar’s Wellcome-funded Economic Gaze project at the Usher Institute (2017-2019) and with Sotiria Grek’s ERC METRO project in social policy (2019-2021) at the University of Edinburgh. Between 2021 and 2023, she was a lecturer of the social anthropology of health at Durham University. She is the co-author of Governing the Sustainable Development Goals: Quantification in Global Public Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), which analyses the emergence of sustainability politics and the expanded role of quantification within these politics. She is currently developing her monograph, Malarial Proximities: Ordering Illness and Global Health Discourses in Senegal, based on her multi-sited ethnographic doctoral research on pharmaceutical interventions, antimalarial resistance research, and community-based approaches to the fight against malaria in Senegal.
https://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/marlee-tichenor