School of Social and Political Science

Background

My work is positioned at the intersection of medical anthropology, crip studies, and the anthropology of ethics. My research explores the relationship between imagination, affect, and aesthetics in the context of death and dying, with a focus on assisted suicide. Based on fieldwork in the UK and Switzerland, my book manuscript, Imagining Death: The Affects and Aesthetics of Assisted Suicide, brings anthropological methods into conversation with crip theory to rethink accompaniment at the end of life. Rather than locating ethics in certainty and choice, the book foregrounds ambivalence, interdependence, and open-endedness as generative ethical stances.

My teaching emphasizes writing as inquiry and ethnography as a relational practice. I teach and work with ethnographic media—film, sound, and visual methods—in the hopes of rethinking how anthropologists produce and disseminate knowledge. I encourage students to experiment with form and reflexivity, and through teaching I have developed a collaborative, student-centered pedagogy.