I am a social and medical anthropologist. Currently, I am a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Social Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London, and an Editorial Board Member and Reviews Editor at the journal Medicine Anthropology Theory.
My anthropological research uses clinical ethnography to examine the aesthetics and affective politics of care. My first book project, Composing Care: Aesthetics and Affect in the Clinic, draws on ethnographic research with music therapists in Canadian and American hospitals to examine how forms of care come to matter, including how they are recognized—or fail to be recognized—as clinical. By tracing how musical practices (playing, listening, improvising, songwriting) are transposed into therapeutic interventions within biomedical settings, it develops an analytic of the aesthetics of care to show how clinical value is produced through tensions between what can be measured, what can be perceived, and what can be felt.
Funded by a Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award (2026-2031), my current project, Madness in Medicine: Psychotic Experiences and Innovative Approaches to Mental Health Care in the UK, is a community-engaged clinical ethnography that explores how clinical practitioners and people with lived experience in South London are revaluing psychotic-like experiences, engaging them therapeutically as insight or illness through experimental psychedelic trials and new models of psychosis care.
As an interdisciplinary and collaborative health researcher, my broader work has explored questions of disability justice and the politics of sexual and reproductive health care in Canada (2022-2025), and gender, sexuality, and health inequities in Canada and South Africa (2012-2018), including the gendered dimensions of HIV/AIDS.
I hold a PhD in Social Anthropology from York University (2021), an MA in Gender Studies from Central European University (2011), and a BMus (Hons) in Music from Dalhousie University (2010).
My research and teaching interests include social & cultural anthropology; medical anthropology; anthropology of care; anthropology of science & technology; sensory anthropology; anthropology of art, affect, & aesthetics; disability anthropology & mad studies; decolonial, feminist, queer & crip theory; ethnographic methods & writing.