Journal sections, which currently comprise Position Pieces, Photo Essays, Reviews, and Field Notes are edited by academics appointed by the MAT Collective. Current section editors are listed below.
Felicity Aulino, Photo Essays
University of Massachussetts Amherst
Felicity Aulino is a medical anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, with primary area specialization in Thailand and a research focus on care, moral practice, and social change. In her recent book, Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (2019, Cornell University Press), she explores habituated practices of providing for others, along with the transformative potential of such acts. She is currently working on local theories of mind, processes of knowledge formation, (extra)ordinary experience, and care for the seen as well as the unseen.
https://www.umass.edu/anthro/felicity-aulino
Jerome Crowder, Photo Essays
University of Houston
Jerome is a medical and visual anthropologist who has worked in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes and most recently in East Houston and Galveston, Texas conducting ethnographic and community based research. He is the co-author of Visual Research: A Concise Introduction to Thinking Visually (Bloomsbury, 2013) and a co-editor of Anthropological Data in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2020). He has offered courses on visual analysis for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the University of Florida, health and migration for Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) and made a film about Dax Cowart, patients’ rights activist, which is distributed by Alexander Street Press. His exhibit of photos documenting the lives of rural-urban migrants in Bolivia, Sueños Urbanos: Urban Dreams- The Search for a Better Life in Bolivia has toured the United States and South America since it opened in 2000. He is the current President of the Society for Visual Anthropology and an associate professor at the University of Houston College of Medicine.
https://www.uh.edu/medicine/about/faculty/jerome-crowder/
Meredith Evans, Review Essays
University of Toronto Scarborough
Meredith’s work uses clinical ethnography to examine the aesthetics and affective politics of care. Her book project, Composing Care: Music Therapy and Clinical Aesthetics, explores the making of music therapy as a clinical profession in Canada and the United States and shows that care practices must be felt as clinical to be understood as clinical. By ethnographically tracing how the creative care practices of hospital music therapists both affirm and exceed normative clinical aesthetics, Composing Care charts the making and remaking of the sensory and social worlds of biomedicine. As a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Meredith leads the qualitative arm of collaborative mixed-methods and community-engaged research study that investigates the sexual and reproductive health care experiences of women and transgender people with disabilities. Previously, her work focused on the sociocultural and gendered dynamics of the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic. Meredith has a PhD in Social Anthropology from York University, an MA in Gender Studies from Central European University, and a BMus (Hons) from Dalhousie University.
https://www.mgbevans.com
Benjamin Hegarty, Review Essays
University of New South Wales Sydney
Benjamin is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of transgender studies, queer theory, and global health. Through ethnographic methods, his research investigates how sexual subjectivity and gendered embodiment shape the distribution of health, illness, and inequality at scales ranging from the microbial to the social. He has an ongoing commitment to community-based research which explains the relationship between structural violence and health outcomes for transgender people based on long-term fieldwork in Indonesia. His book, The Made-Up State: Trans Femininity, Technology, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2022) was awarded the 2023 Anne Bolin and Gilbert Herdt Prize in Human Sexuality by the American Anthropological Association. He is a Senior Research Associate in Global Health Equity and Justice at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Wales Sydney.
https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-benjamin-hegarty
Luisa Enria, Field Notes
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Luisa is Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Her research brings together insights from political and medical anthropology to explore contestations and imaginations of development, global health, and humanitarian response. Her first book The Politics of Work in a Post-Conflict State: Youth, Labour and Violence in Sierra Leone (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) focused on the experiences of unemployment and post-war political violence amongst young people in Freetown. In 2015–16 she worked as an anthropologist in the Ebola vaccine trials and has since then been interested in discussions about the contested role of ethnographic evidence in global health. She currently holds a UKRI Fellowship to explore the politics of knowledge in epidemic preparedness and response, studying the possibilities and limits of dialogue across communities of practice in Sierra Leone and in international interdisciplinary collaborations. Other recent projects have included developing training for community-led ethnographic research in health emergencies. Luisa is also interested in debates about (in)justice in academic practice and the political and ethical challenges of fieldwork.
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/aboutus/people/enria.luisa
Matthew Thomann, Field Notes
University of Maryland
Matthew is a critical medical anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research examines sexuality and the politics of health in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States, crossing subfields of medical anthropology, global health, and queer anthropology. Thomann’s current work seeks to document the landscape of ad-hoc care available to Kenyan sexual minority men living with advanced cases of HPV-related anal warts and cancers. Previously, he conducted long-term ethnographic research examining how the inclusion of sexual and gender minorities in global HIV science and research unfolds within the socio-political terrains of everyday life in Côte d’Ivoire. Additionally, his work has traced the politics of scaling-up biomedical HIV technologies, including the promotion of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in the United States and HIV self-testing technologies in Kenya. His research has been funded by the US Fulbright Scholar Award, the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR), the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the West African Research Association.
https://anth.umd.edu/facultyprofile/thomann/matthew