Ph.D. University of Virginia 2004

Accepting advisees

Specialties

When I left Charlottesville to begin my PhD fieldwork in sociocultural anthropology in 1999, I had no idea I would spend the next 20 years applying anthropology in a public health context in South Africa. I had gone to South Africa to better understand how those who had lived through apartheid-era political violence were responding to the post-apartheid process of ‘reconciliation’, and in particular, that process’ embrace of a psychotherapeutic discourse to frame the work of personal, social and political repair after apartheid. My book on ‘traumatic storytelling’ among South African victims of apartheid violence examined the psychological, social, moral, cultural, political and economic dimensions of this storytelling work.

My time in South Africa also sparked an interest in public health. I had arrived at the moment when AIDS activism in the country was entering its most intense phase. As I was finishing my PhD, I started an MPH in epidemiology was introduced to a world where social science could make a much-needed contribution. The challenge of improving the public’s health can only be met by an intellectually ambitious, interdisciplinary enterprise that meaningfully integrates all relevant disciplines. In this effort, critical social sciences like medical anthropology play a fundamental role, as fundamental as epidemiology or any other bioscience. This perspective has animated my teaching, research and practice at the intersection of anthropology and public health for the last two decades.

After my fieldwork, I settled in Cape Town and began working at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) School of Public Health. I developed a new Division of Social and Behavioural Sciences in the School and conducted research and training in a wide variety of research areas. While I have worked on a number of different gender, sexual and reproductive health-related topics, my work on men, masculinity and HIV has occupied most of my attention recently. Using a critical feminist masculinity-studies lens, my work has focused on several questions, including: 1) how might gender rights activists and researchers meaningfully engage with men and boys around the persistent health challenges they face while avoiding reproducing either existing gendered forms of power or racialized narratives about the ‘problem’ of Black South African men, 2) how might gender activists and those they work with navigate the sometimes profound moral and political ambivalences they experience in relation to dominant global ideological frameworks for feminist gender transformation work, 3) how state-led HIV treatment and global gender rights activism interact to shape local men’s gendered practices and subjectivities, and, 4) what significant ‘gender change’ actually looks like and what might reasonably be expected to produce it. In addition to the research and policy work connected to this research (see below), it has also included a significant community-engaged research component, including support for the work of the South African health activist group Movement for Change and Social Justice (MCSJ).

My other main area of recent research focuses on ‘qualitative evidence syntheses’ (QES), a method for synthesizing social science research (on any topic) for global health policy- and decision-making. This is a fairly new but rapidly growing field of knowledge production that I have been involved with since its early days. My engagement in this area, however, is not only as a methodological developer and an author of numerous QES reviews. I have also worked on a parallel stream of research that reflects critically on the evolution and significance of this new form of knowledge production in global health policymaking. I have been fascinated, for example, with the tensions between researchers (many of them anthropologists) who have actively adopted these mainstream methods for health knowledge and knowledge translation, on the one hand, and those more critically-minded anthropologists who look skeptically on such initiatives, warning of the dangers of cooptation into regimes of global health metrics and technocratic governance. I am sympathetic to both sides and, in my writing, have tried to think through new ways of imagining this tension.

Finally, I have a long-standing but recently growing interest in health activism and the evolution of moral and political economies of care. My earlier work in this area focused on AIDS activists and their negotiation of the relationships between communities and scientific researchers. More recently, I have examined the ways gender activists have worked to include men and boys in new ways in local care economies. And I have just started a book project with a close friend and mentor on distinctive new forms of social suffering that are coming into being because of climate change and the new kinds of caregiving (and the ecosocial imaginaries that inform them) needed to respond adequately to this challenge.

In 2017, I transitioned back to the US and worked in UVA’s Department of Public Health Sciences until this year (2025) when I was appointed to the Department of Anthropology. I am also currently serving as the Director of UVA’s Global Studies Program, a pan-university interdisciplinary undergraduate program.

Selected Publications

2025 Crisis, Complexity, Ambivalence: The Limits and Lived Experiences of Gender-Transformation interventions. In The Forgotten Realities of Men: Critical Reflections on Masculinity in Contemporary Society. M. Lafrance, J.-M. Deslauriers, G. Tremblay, and P. Hoebanx, eds. Pp. 333-351. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

2023 Qualitative evidence synthesis. In Encyclopedia of Health Research in the Social Sciences. Pp. 264-268: Edward Elgar Publishing.

2022 Making Space for Qualitative Evidence in Global Maternal and Child Health Policymaking. In Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health. L.J. Wallace, M.E. MacDonald, and K. Storeng, eds: Springer.

2022 Understanding global health policy engagements with qualitative research: Qualitative evidence syntheses and the OptimizeMNH guidelines. Soc Sci Med 300:114678.

2019 Traumatic Storytelling and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Performing Signs of Injury. London and New York: Routledge.

2018 South African Medical Anthropology in the Wake of HIV. American Anthropologist 120(3):554-558.

2017 (with Steven Robins) Drug Patents and Shit Politics in South Africa: Reconfiguring the Politics of the "Scientific" and the "Global" in Global Health Interventions. In Thinking Through Resistance: A Study of Public Oppositions to Contemporary Global Health Practice. N. Bulled, ed. Pp. 128-142. New York and London: Routledge

2016 The Many Uses of Moral Magnetism: Volunteer Caregiving and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in South Africa. In Volunteer Economies: The Politics and Ethics of Voluntary Labour in Africa. R. Prince and H. Brown, eds. Pp. 254. African Issues: Boydell and Brewer Colvin*, Christopher J

2015 (with Alison Swartz) Extension agents or agents of change?: Community health workers and the politics of care work in postapartheid South Africa. Annals of Anthropological Practice 39(1):29-41.

2015 Anthropologies in and of Evidence Making in Global Health Research and Policy. Medical Anthropology 34(2):99-105.

2014 Evidence and AIDS activism: HIV scale-up and the contemporary politics of knowledge in global public health. Global Public Health 9(1-2):57-72.

2012 True believers or modern believers: HIV science and the work of the Dr Rath Foundation. In Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge. S. Levine, ed. Pp. 33-54. Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press