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.