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.
Jan Brunson, Position Pieces
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Jan (PhD Brown University) is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her ethnographic research in Nepal focuses on global projects of inventory and intervention alongside Nepali women’s projects of reproduction and family making. Her first book, Planning Families in Nepal: Global and Local Projects of Reproduction, offers an intersectional account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding reproduction and family. She co-edited the transdisciplinary book International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes and, most recently, a special issue of Social Science and Medicine, which serves as an ethnographic interrogation of contemporary global health metrics and ontologies of intervention enacted in the Global South (‘Behind the Measures of Maternal and Reproductive Health’). She served as the chair of the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction from 2015 to 2017.
https://anthropology.manoa.hawaii.edu/jan-brunson/
Dwaipayan Banerjee, Position Pieces
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Dwai is an associate professor of science, technology, and society (STS) at MIT. He earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology at NYU and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. He also holds an MPhil and an MA in sociology from the Delhi School of Economics. His first monograph, Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi (Duke University Press, 2020), presents the efforts of the urban poor in Delhi to carve out a livable life with cancer as they negotiate an over-extended health system. Through ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and analyses of cultural texts, he describes how cancer shapes and is shaped by local social worlds. He has also co-authored Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India (Cornell University Press, 2019) with Jacob Copeman. Hematologies examines how the giving and receiving of blood has shaped social and political life in North India in the 20th and 21st centuries. His current research—‘Decolonizing Science: Towards a Cosmopolitics of Art, Physics and Computing in 1950s India’—tracks scientific and aesthetic internationalisms in early postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta.
https://sts-program.mit.edu/people/sts-faculty/dwai-banerjee/
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/
Marlee Tichenor, Review Essays
University of Durham
Marlee is a medical anthropologist whose research investigates the politics of evidence and data in health policy and intervention and the logics of global health governance. Her doctoral research at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco was a multi-sited ethnographic study of pharmaceutical interventions, antimalarial resistance research, and community-based approaches to the fight against malaria in Senegal. Her second project, with the Usher Institute’s Global Health Governance Programme at the University of Edinburgh, examined the development of metrics at the World Bank for measuring success in global health projects, as well as their influence on the global agenda of – and national strategies for – universal health coverage (UHC). This work has included both examining the development of UHC policies in Senegal, as well as analysing the reach of economic language and the particular discursive histories of concepts like health equity in global initiatives for UHC. Her current research, as a part of the METRO project in Social Policy, interrogates the way statistical capacity development became its own goal in the global push for the Sustainable Development Goals, and how official statistics have been situated, and have become, a new contentious terrain for a growing community of international organisations to stake claims over sustainable futures.
https://www.marleetichenor.com/
Luisa Enria, Field Notes
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
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