School of Social and Political Science

Background

Meredith Evans is a social and medical anthropologist whose research uses clinical ethnography to examine the aesthetics and affective politics of care. 

Her first book project, Composing Care: Aesthetics and Affect in the Clinic, draws on ethnographic research with music therapists in hospitals and long-term care settings in Canada and the United States. The book examines how forms of care come to matter, including how they are recognized—or fail to be recognized—as clinical, by tracing how musical acts (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.

Supported by a Wellcome Trust Early-Career Award (2026–2031), her current project, Madness in Medicine: Psychotic Experiences and Innovative Approaches to Mental Health Care in the UK, is a community-engaged clinical ethnography examining how clinicians and people with lived experience in South London are revaluing psychotic-like experiences across psychedelic trials and psychosis care settings. The project explores how altered states of consciousness are engaged therapeutically and come to be rendered as insight or illness.

Her broader research has included work on disability justice and sexual and reproductive health in Canada, as well as the gendered dimensions of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. This collaborative research in public health has examined health inequalities and clinical care, informing her current anthropological work on care, value, and recognition.

She holds 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).

Topics interested in supervising

• Anthropology of care, healing, and therapeutic practice
• Anthropology of mental health, psychiatry, and psychology
• Clinical ethnography
• Aesthetics, affect, and sensory ethnography
• Feminist, queer, mad/crip, and decolonial approaches to health and medicine

If you are interested in being supervised by Meredith Evans, please see the links below for more information:

• PhD in Social Anthropology
• MSc Social Anthropology
• MSc Medical Anthropology
• MSc Global Mental Health and Society