Executive Board

Sean Brotherton is Professor of Anthropology at New York University.   He is a cultural anthropologist who studies and theorizes health, medicine, the state, subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.  Brotherton’s research intervenes in debates of medical anthropology, the anthropology of the body, and Latin American and Caribbean studies.  Across his work, he asks: What constitutes health or well-being, or the notion of a healthy subject, to whom does it matter, and why?  Over the past two decades, his overarching research questions have sought to weave historical, epistemological, and ethnographic modes of analysis into a theoretical approach that he calls a ‘genealogy of individual bodily practices.’ Within this framework, he examines the sometimes contradictory and overlapping relationships among quotidian individual practices, economic reform, and state power. Brotherton’s books include two monographs (Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba(Duke University Press) and Global Health, Otherwise: Cuba and the Politics of Care(under contract by Duke UP). He is currently working on another project, Armed Against Unhappiness: Psychoanalytic Grammars in Buenos Aires, which examines how diverse psychoanalytic communities in Buenos Aires have produced distinctive grammars that influence how individuals articulate ideas about health and well-being. A complete list of his publications is available on academia.edu.

Clara Han is Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research investigates the intersections of neighborhood, medical and legal institutions, and intimate life in contexts marked by both the slow, corrosive violence of economic precarity and the catastrophic violence of torture, extrajudicial killing and war. Two thematic clusters that cross-cut anthropology undergird this research: first, the experience of illness in contexts marked by economic deprivation; and second, the articulation of violence, affliction, and kinship. For over twenty years, Professor Han has conducted research in low-income neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile. More recently, she has conducted research in Korea, focusing particularly on the Korean War and the partitioning of the two Koreas. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she lead a multi-country study on the household decision-making, movement restrictions, disease and everyday life. Funded by a NSF RAPID, it has led to a research network across the Southern Cone in Latin America on Covid-19. She is the author of Life in Debt: Time of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (2012; 2022, Spanish translation) and Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (2021), and the co-editor of Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (2015). Her forthcoming book Echoes of a Death (Fordham University Press, under contract) follows the reverberations of the death of a young man at the hands of police in a low-income neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. It explores the textures of living with loss and affliction in kinship and in a neighborhood milieu marked by state violence. See publications on academia.edu

Narelle Warren is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor at Monash University (Australia). Her research explores the experiences of chronic conditions and care in structurally and geographically vulnerable communities. She has a particular focus on gender, ageing, and global health. Her current research entitled ‘Global Dementias’ explores understandings of dementia and dementia care in Australia, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

Ugo F. Edu is Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department at University of California, Los Angeles. She is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, Black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Her scholarship takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying the conceptualizations and enactments of health that are counterproductive to a quest for health equity as they manifest in the practices, research, and curricula of medicine, public/global health, and the sciences. She focuses on the politics of reproduction, reproductive health, body modifying techniques, and health equity in both global and national contexts. Her book project: The “Family Planned”: Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. 

Jessica Hardin, Honorable Barber B. Conable Jr. Endowed Chair and Associate Professor, at Rochester Institute of Technology, is a medical anthropologist who studies temporalities, knowledge production, embodiment and methodology. Hardin’s research contributes to the study of chronic illnesses like diabetes, trying to understand how the nexus of food accessibility, healthcare availability, and community institutions shape the wellness landscape. Essential to her feminist approach is paying critical attention to how racialization operates in shaping how healthcare is practiced and how gender makes a difference in shaping how those health inequities are reproduced. She has conducted ethnographic and collaborative research in Samoa and in the United States and this work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Hardin’s books include Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight in Samoa, Paraguay, Japan and the US (2021, University of Toronto Press, coauthored with Cindi SturtzSreetharan, Alexandra Brewis, Sarah Trainer and Amber Wutich) and Faith and the Pursuit of Health: Cardiometabolic Disorders in Samoa (2019, Rutgers University Press). She has published articles in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology and most recently in Anthropology & Education Quarterly.

William Lucas is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His work crosscuts medical anthropology, focusing on food and nutrition, disability anthropology, and biocultural approaches to rehabilitation broadly conceived. His current project is mixed methods and multimodal where he is conducting archival research on assistive technologies vis-à-vis paralysis alongside oral history interviews with paralysis patients with diverse injury time spans. This research has valuable implications for the social model of disability as well as concepts such as intersectionality, necropolitics, and inclusivity.

Jane Leslie Saffitz is an Assistant Professor of Cultural and Medical Anthropology at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Her research focuses on contested bodies as they are taken up in diverse projects within and beyond biomedicine, including justice-based movements for minoritized groups in the Global South. Saffitz’s first project examines albinism in Tanzania, as both a genetic condition and category that exceeds biomedicine. Her book manuscript, Lightness and Alterity, traces of the collapse of practices ordinarily separated as violent or humanitarian, spiritual or scientific, inscrutable or manifest, and, in their wake, makes the case for a semiotic approach to unruly bodies and categories. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Program, Wenner-Gren Foundation, University of California, and Denison University. Her latest article, “Realms Unseen,” was published in American Ethnologist. Prior to serving on the SMA Executive Board, she chaired the SMA’s Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Integrative Medicine (CAM/IM) Interest Group.

Cal Biruk is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. Their primary research program explores the social and political liveliness of data and metrics in global health worlds in Malawi. Across their body of work, they ask a simple, yet thorny, question: What’s in a number? Currently, they are engaging ethnographic and archival material to track the ‘becomings’ of key global health metrics, concepts, and technologies from the colonial period to the present in Malawi, with interest in how they have produced enduring narrow and racialized imaginaries of African health and vulnerability. They are also working on two projects in Ontario. The first employs creative methods to map and visualize Canadian older adults’ dataspheres and data experiences. The second is a collaboration with Lyndsey Beutin (titled Sick Futurity), and combines media ethnography, visual analysis, and interviews to critically analyze the normative, racialized, and number-centric definitions of ‘health’ upheld by North American diabetes care protocols. Cal is the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke University Press) and the co-editor of a collection of Malawian LGBTQI life stories titled Proudly Malawian. Cal is also the co-author of a book titled Birding(under contract with Duke University Press) that explores the pleasures and politics of birdwatching.

Aalyia Feroz Ali Sadruddin is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on demographic transitions, cultures of health, and emergent biomedical technologies in postconflict settings. Sadruddin is currently writing her first book, After-After-Lives, which is an ethnographic examination of aging, creative modes of expression, and intergenerational experiences of time in the decades following ethnic and political violence in Rwanda. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Brown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University. She has published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology Now, and Social Science & Medicine.

My research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, and Latinx/Latin American studies. In its various manifestations, my research examines the health consequences and sociocultural implications of migrant policing, deportation, our fractured asylum system, environmental injustice, and the global War on Drugs. I am currently developing my first book manuscript, tentatively titled Captive States: Migration and Expulsion on the Carceral Frontier, which ethnographically examines how the U.S. deportation regime and predatory asylum bureaucracies have transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderland region into a zone of captivity for Central American migrants and Mexican deportees. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2018, this project examines the everyday lives and survival strategies of these communities in Tijuana, Mexico. Moving between migrant and homeless encampments, governmental and private shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, and activist-run medical clinics, this project analyzes the lives of those subjected to intersecting forms of confinement and targeted attrition at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Dr. Hedges is an associate professor of anthropology at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.  She is an applied medical anthropologist with a focus on using community-based ethnographic research approaches to understand local cultural construction of health, illness, and risk. Her research interests are linked to gender inequality and health; including substance use, HIV/AIDS, infectious disease, health emergencies, and traditional medicinal knowledge. Dr Hedges received her MA in Applied Anthropology from Oregon State University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona.  She publishes to a broad, interdisciplinary audience through journals such as: Journal of Ethnobiology, Journal of Youth Studies, Anthropology & Medicine, and Human Organization.

Maryani Palupy Rasidjan is an Assistant Professor at New York University whose work is animated by questions of postcoloniality, racialization, power and reproductive justice. Her doctoral research, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the UC Pacific-Rim Research Program, investigates Indonesian state family planning structures in West Papua as they relate to questions of Blackness and Indigeneity.

Yesmar is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University where she is pursuing certificates in Women and Gender Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory. Her research follows dermatology residents as they learn how to do their work in diverse US cities. Yesmar’s research takes special interest in understanding how categories to describe and classify skin based on color are made and applied in dermatology, specifically in the broader context of an already racialized society. Before matriculating at Rice, Yesmar also earned a Master of Public Health from the George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Anindita Majumdar is Associate Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. She has been researching commercial surrogacy, kinship and infertility since 2010. Her book based on her ethnographic research was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press, and is titled Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)Making of Kin in India. The monograph was also shortlisted for the Bloomsbury LSE Social Anthropology Monograph Award 2016. Anindita was invited to contribute to the Oxford India Short Introductions Series on Surrogacy, which was published in 2019. Anindita is on the international advisory board of the journal Medicine, Anthropology, Theory, and is an external member of Center for Reproductive Health (CORTH) at the University of Sussex. In 2023, she was Social Sciences and Public Policy Global Visiting Fellow at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. Currently, Anindita is writing a book on her research linked to age, in-vitro fertilization and the biological clock in India, funded by Wellcome UK. Findings from her research have been previously published in four dedicated special issues edited with Asian Bioethics Review,Contemporary South Asia, Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online, and Anthropology and Aging.

Anika Jugovic Spajic is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her interests lie in the intersection of medical anthropology and anthropology of the state. Her dissertation concerns the practices of patient-activists with diabetes and the ongoing negotiations of their positions and caregiving responsibilities in the larger matrix of the public-private healthcare system in Serbia. She is also interested in the interplay between chronicity and politics of pandemics. She sometimes tweets here: @_p_anika.

Sanghamitra is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Anthropology and the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her doctoral dissertation investigated the politics of sickle cell management in India, a rare genetic blood disorder that is biomedically characterized as primarily affecting Dalit-Bahujan and Indigenous/Adivasi communities in India. By centering on lived experiences, this research highlights alternative Indigenous articulations of social, economic, medical, and environmental justice that trouble biotech-centric public health interventions for marginalized communities. Sanghamitra’s broader work investigates how notions of social difference—emanating in Race, Caste, and Indigenous positionalities—are essentialized through biogenetic discourses that then structure global and local political economies of health.

Taylor Bell is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her research weaves together medical anthropology, economic anthropology, science and technology studies and disability studies to better understand the shifting role of pharmacies as sites of health seeking and providing. She is currently finishing her dissertation which is based on three years of observation in Greek neighborhood pharmacies. Over a decade of austerity measures reshaped Greece’s universal healthcare system, triggering drastic pharmaceutical shortages and dwindling access to clinical care for many. Her dissertation asks: how does the receding welfare state reverberate in neighborhood pharmacies?

Deven Gray is a PhD student in Applied Anthropology at the University of South Florida. His dissertation concerns food bank responses efforts during and post-COVID-19 pandemic times, and is undergoing PhD candidacy this Spring, 2024. He is an applied medical anthropologist with experience in public health interventions, program evaluation, and addressing pandemic health concerns. He served as assistant editor for the applied anthropology journal, Human Organization, and has published academic articles on Zika virus, COVID-19, food security, and an edited chapter on the anthropology of food. Additionally, he has served as a program evaluator and report writer on multiple Feeding America food assistance programs and health interventions, and continues to serve as an evaluator for the Hillsborough Homegrown food systems initiative.