‌Author biographies

Aaron Ansell is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in Brazilian state formation, patron-client politics, social policy, and rural community life. His ethnographic writings employ methods from linguistic anthropology to analyse emerging expressions of democratic subjectivity and counter-democratic reactivity. He is currently Associate Professor of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech.

André Menard holds a PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is Professor and researcher at the Department of Anthropology of the Universidad de Chile. His work has centred on Mapuche political history, focusing on the political uses of the notion of race in Chilean and Mapuche context. In this frame he has edited, with Jorge Pavez the photographic album Mapuche y Anglicanos, vestigios fotográficos de la Misión Araucana de Kepe (1896-1908) (Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros, 2008), and more recently the manuscripts of the mystical Mapuche leader Manuel Aburto Panguilef, Libro Diario del Presidente de la Federación Araucana, Manuel Aburto Panguilef (1940-1951) (Santiago de Chile: CoLibris, 2013). His current research focuses on the theories of fetish and their applications to the analysis of materiality, magic and politics.

Anna Harris writes about the sensory, bodily, material practices entailed in medical work. She has conducted ethnographic research concerning migrant doctors, genetic testing and sound in hospitals. Her chapter relates to a project she is currently leading on technologies in medical education called Making Clinical Sense (funded by the ERC, grant #678390). She is author of A Sensory Education (Routledge, 2020), and co-author of CyberGenetics (Routledge, 2016) and Stethoscope (Reaktion, 2022). Her current book project is called Learning Materials. Anna works as Associate Professor in the STS research group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Anna Wilking is a writer, anthropologist, documentary filmmaker, and adjunct professor in Brooklyn, NY. She is also a community organizer, working with undocumented Latina sex workers in the South Bronx. She earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from New York University in 2015. Her research focused on street prostitution in Quito, Ecuador and she is currently writing a book about her work. Sea La Luz (Let There Be Light) won the AAA’s award for best graduate student film of 2014 and has screened in festivals internationally.

Annemarie Mol is Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. In her work she combines the ethnographic study of practices with the task of shifting our theoretical repertoires. She is author of The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Duke University Press, 2002), The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice (Routledge University Press 2008), and Eating in Theory (Duke University Press 2021).

Atsuro Morita teaches anthropology at Osaka University. He did ethnographic research on technology development in Thailand focusing on how ideas, artefacts, and people travel in and out of the country. His interest has recently shifted to techno-social movements for transition for sustainability in Japan. His research has been recently published in Science, Technology and Human Values; HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory; and Ethnos.

Carole McGranahan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her research focuses on issues of colonialism and empire, history and memory, power and politics, refugees and citizenship, nationalism, senses of belonging, gender, war, and anthropology as theoretical storytelling. Her book Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010) tells the history of the grassroots Tibetan Chushi Gangdrug army through the ethnographic study of veterans’ lives and the politics of memory in exile.

Christine Labuski is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society and Women’s and Gender Studies at Virginia Tech. She teaches courses about sexual medicine, queer tech, and ecofeminisms, she directs the Gender, Bodies & Technology initiative at VT, and she is a founding member of the Mayapple Energy Transition Collective.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, jointly appointed between the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. Writing of this article was supported in part by a Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in Science and Technology Studies at Harvey Mudd College. Her book on the taste of water is forthcoming with the University of California Press.

Constanza Tizzoni is a social anthropologist from the Universidad de Chile. She currently works as a Research Assistant at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has conducted different ethnographic studies on parenting and care with women living in low-income neighborhoods in Santiago de Chile. Her research interests are motherhood, care, everyday lives and neoliberalism.

Elizabeth Lewis is a medical anthropologist based at the Texas Center for Disability Studies in Austin, Texas. Her research examines the social life of complex disability diagnoses, and she is engaged in multiple applied disability projects on health and family experiences in the United States. Additional information on her work, research, and writing is available at lizlewisphd.com.

Emily Yates-Doerr is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and Oregon State University. Her work on this book project was supported by an NWO Veni grant (#016.158.020) and a European Research Council grant for research on global maternal nutrition (#759414). She is author of The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala (University of California Press, 2015) and is writing a second book focused on maternal malnutrition projects and American genocide in Guatemala.

Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (aka Fanya Rappburg when writing together) are both faculty members in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. Since 2007, they have been carrying out research on cognitive disability and cultural innovation, with an ethnographic focus on New York City. Their book, Disability Worlds, will be published by Duke University Press. They founded NYU’s Center for Disability Studies in 2017, where Faye is co-director. With support from the National Science Foundation, and along with colleague Mara Mills, Fanya has assembled a team of researchers learning how people with diverse disabilities fared during the pandemic, leading to a forthcoming book, How to Be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press).

Filippo Bertoni is the founder of FILOtypes, a consultancy for transdisciplinary research and publishing based in Amsterdam. After doing obtaining their PhD with Annemarie Mol’s research team to learn about “The Eating Body in Western Theory and Practice”, Filo worked on the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene programme, an interdisciplinary and experimental project led by Anna Tsing and Nils Bubandt, as well as in the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin with Tahani Nadim, exploring the entanglements and ecologies of knowledge making at the intersections between social and life sciences and beyond. Putting their experience in transdisciplinary research into practice, Filo now helps other projects in academia and beyond to navigate the shifting landscapes of knowledge production.

Ildikó Zonga Plájás studied anthropology and cultural studies in Romania and Hungary and then earned a degree in visual ethnography from Leiden University. She was a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the RaceFaceID Research Project led by Amade M’charek, where she researched how visual technologies in governance enact certain groups as racial others. Currently, she is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the project “The Security Politics of Computer Vision” at Leiden University and a lecturer of visual anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Swamp Dialogues is her first anthropological film.

Janelle Lamoreaux is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is author of Infertile Environments (Duke University Press, 2022), which is an ethnographic exploration of epigenetic toxicology and the intersection of environmental and reproductive health in China. She is also co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Genomics, Health and Society (Routledge, 2018), and is currently researching postgenomic understandings of reproductive cells and cryoconservation movements.

Jason Danely is Reader of Anthropology and Chair of the Healthy Ageing & Care Research and Innovation Network at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Fragile Resonance: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England (Cornell University Press, 2022), and Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan (Rutgers University Press, 2015). He also co-edited Vulnerability and the Politics of Care (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course (Berghahn Books, 2013). He is currently conducting research with formerly incarcerated older adults in Japan and England.

Jenna Grant is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, where she teaches anthropology of medicine, technology, visuality, and Southeast Asia. Her book, Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh (University of Washington Press, 2022) explores histories and contemporary practices of medical imaging in Cambodia’s capital. She is currently studying the interface of experimental global health sciences and border practices in the Mekong subregion and working with the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Royal University of Phnom Penh to support their graduate programs.

Jennifer Carlson is a cultural anthropologist specialising in the energy humanities. She lectures in anthropology at Southwestern University and is a visiting research fellow at Rice University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. Her research focuses on the everyday, affective dimensions of energy transitions and political repercussions in Germany and the United States. Over the course of this work, she has become interested in the relationship between life and infrastructure, asking how life forms are appropriated in—and articulated through—energy development projects.

John Bodinger de Uriarte is Professor of anthropology and serves as the Chair of the Sociology & Anthropology Department at Susquehanna University. He also directs the Museum Studies and Diversity Studies Programs. His research interests include questions of identity, representation, and Native American sovereignty, and how such issues are engaged in contemporary museum, casino, and photographic practice. He is the author of Casino and Museum: Mashantucket Pequot Representation (University of Arizona Press, 2007); most recently he served as lead editor for Study Abroad and the Quest for an Anti-Tourism Experience (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

Ken MacLeish is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and Anthropology at Vanderbilt. He studies how war, broadly considered, takes shape in the everyday lives of people whose job it is to produce it—U.S. military servicemembers and their families and communities. His book, Making War: Everyday Life at Ft. Hood (Princeton University Press, 2013), examines the everyday lives of the soldiers, families, and communities who personally bear the burden of America’s most recent wars.

Melissa Biggs is a social anthropologist specializing in issues of representation and critical cultural heritage. She serves as Assistant Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at Colorado College, the Culinary Institute of America in San Antonio, Southwestern University, Texas State University, and the University of Texas at Austin. From 2016-2017, she was a Fulbright García-Robles Scholar in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.

Nicholas Copeland is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. His book, The Democracy Development Machine: Neoliberalism, Radical Pessimism, and Authoritarian Populism in Mayan Guatemala (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines recent transformations in Mayan political experience, illuminating continuities between counterinsurgency, development, and neoliberal democracy. His new research uses politically engaged anthropology and participatory science methodologies to explore the role of water and water science in grassroots defences against extractive development and movements for food sovereignty and buen vivir.

Rima Praspaliauskiene is a medical anthropologist and historian. She received her PhD in the UC Davis Anthropology Department. Her book Enveloped Lives: Caring and Relating in Lithuanian Health Care (Cornell University Press, 2022) is an ethnography of health care practices in post-socialist Lithuania in the times of neoliberal reforms. Her research investigates the relationship between health, care, and money.

Ruth Goldstein is Assistant Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is interested in the gendered aspects of human and nonhuman health, a quickly heating planet and environmental racism. Her current book project Life in Traffic examines the socio-environmental consequences of transnational infrastructure projects and climate change along Latin America’s longest longitudinal thoroughfare, the Interoceanic Highway. Her subsequent research on mercury as a global pollutant, analyzes the racialized weight of toxic body burdens and impacts on parent/child health.

Sameena Mulla is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her book, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Victims (New York University Press, 2014), details all of the labor that forensic nurses put into examining sexual assault victims. It was awarded an Honourable Mention in the 2015 Eileen Basker Prize competition, and also earned Mulla the 2017 Margaret Mead Award. Her second book, a collaborative ethnography with Heather Hlavka, Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, Science and Sexual Assault Adjudication (New York University Press, 2021) follows the evidence collected during forensic examinations to stages of adjudication, this time in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin felony court.

Stephanie Krehbiel is the Executive Director and co-founder of Into Account (www.intoaccount.org), a nonprofit that works directly with survivors confronting churches and other religious institutions. As an advocate, she accompanies survivors through reporting processes, investigations, media coverage, and public storytelling. She has worked with over a hundred individual survivors from a range of denominational backgrounds, from Catholic to Amish to nondenominational evangelicals. Her work has been covered in the New York Times, National Catholic Reporter, the Star-Tribune, and numerous smaller publications. She holds a PhD in American Studies from University of Kansas with a concentration in Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies, and her work as an advocate began during ethnographic research on institutional violence against LGBTQ+ people in the Mennonite Church USA. She is a frequent guest speaker in university and seminary classrooms.

Susan Reynolds Whyte, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, carries out research in East Africa on social efforts to secure well-being in the face of poverty, disease, conflict, and rapid change. For three decades she has worked with African colleagues on Enhancement of Research Capacity projects. She is the author of Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and co-author of Social Lives of Medicines (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Teresa A. Velásquez is Professor of Anthropology at the California State University, San Bernardino. Her research on the intersection of anti-mining activism and state resource policy in the Ecuadorian Andes examines the reconfiguration of farmers’ relationship to their watershed. She is especially interested in writing about women’s political subjectivities and their efforts to defend water as life. She is the author of the book Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador (University of Arizona Press, 2022).

Zoe Todd (Métis) is from Amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton) in Treaty Six Territory in Alberta, Canada. She writes about fish, art, Métis legal traditions, the Anthropocene, extinction, and decolonization in urban and prairie contexts. She also studies human-animal relations, colonialism and environmental change in north/western Canada. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carlton University.