Open vacancy: Position Pieces section editors

Medicine Anthropology Theory is soliciting applications for two co-editors for the journal’s Position Pieces section. As a team, the new Position Pieces co-editors will work with authors to develop contributions, as well as with reviewers in the peer-review process for submissions, and overall contribute to the leadership and direction of the MAT journal. 

Contributions to MAT’s Position Pieces section reflect critically upon authors’ positions relative to the people, material, and concepts they engage. In an effort to subvert traditional relations of power and disciplinary boundaries, Position Pieces gesture to the reality that our own positions—in relation to our interlocutors, the field, the academy, and other disciplines–shape our scholarly activities, professional practices, and knowledge production. We invite contributions that grapple with how to conduct research on health and well-being in more equitable, creative, collaborative, perhaps even destabilising ways. This section of MAT welcomes texts that reflect ‘upstream’ thinking—that is, thoughts and conversations that are creative in genre and form–but that aim to advance theory and praxis. These may be essays, theoretical forays, instigations, or other experimental texts with a tentative, unfinished edge. Position Pieces provoke debate, unearth hidden assumptions, and contribute to the decentring of medical anthropology. In this way, they advance MAT’s broader mission to explore how culture, politics, and social norms bear on medicine, illness, and health—and vice versa.  

The editorship is an unpaid position. The candidates will have completed their Ph.D. in anthropology or a related field, and they may either have already secured a tenure-track or permanent position at their home institution, or they will not have yet secured a tenure-track or permanent position (in which case, they will have designated additional support and mentoring from a member of the MAT editorial collective). The successful candidates will serve in this position for a term of three years. To apply, please send a CV and letter of interest (1-2 pages) to Cristina Moreno Lozano, MAT’s Managing Editor, at MATEditors@ed.ac.uk by 1 July 2024. We will be in touch with candidates of interest to schedule an online interview (expected to take place by 12 July).