Fieldwork for the Making Clinical Sense project: Tamale, Ghana

On a personal note …

I grew up on the island of Tasmania, spending the mild summers on quilts under apricot trees with stacks of library books. In school I was fascinated by two things in particular: the body and the “world out there”, beyond the island shores. So I studied medicine, dissected bodies, laboured over anatomical drawings for my bedroom walls and learned chemical equations off by heart. In my spare time I kept reading and making things, pulling apart clothes and putting them back together again, knitting, sewing, beading. When I graduated I worked as a doctor in rural Tasmania, then rural England, then the Australian border town of Tweed Heads. All the while I travelled as much as I could. There was a pandemic during one trip (SARS) and I became fascinated by questions of public health and cultural differences in medicine. I eventually applied to study medical anthropology back in Australia for a Masters degree, then after much thought, more travelling, returned for a PhD. I still love reading novels from the library and making things with my hands, including more recently cooking, becoming somewhat obsessed by cookbooks, lugging around a growing collection from place to place. I am fascinated with craftsmanship, whether related to medical practice, making objects or cooking food, thinking about how things are put together, tinkered with, how people are instructed and learn skilled practices, the sensory knowledge involved, and how this tells us something about bodies – what bodies can do, how they change and how they work with tools and technologies.

I grew up on the edge of London’s commuter belt, where I spent most of my time in what green spaces remain. Childhood daydreams were fostered by maps and history books, and I am extremely privileged to still be daydreaming about such things.

I was trained in the School of History at the University of Leeds, where I fell in love with Yorkshire and its Dales. A decade in the north of England was punctuated by long periods abroad, for travel, training and research.

I have held fellowships at Leeds, as well as at Pennsylvania State University and as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I have received funding from, amongst others, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Past & Present Society and the Society for the Social History of Medicine. In 2014 I was a recipient of the Royal Historical Society’s Martin Lynn Scholarship for the study of African history.

Away from books, I enjoy breaking and fixing bicycles, and riding bicycles when they’re not broken.

Having grown up on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, I received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies (anthropology) from The University of Sydney. Following this, I relocated to Copenhagen, Denmark where I obtained my Master of Science (research) in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen. Here, my MSc. fieldwork and thesis (completed under the supervision of Professor Dr Susan Reynolds Whyte) explored the contemporary temporal and experiential configurations of impaired fecundity in the United States, in light of the development, uptake, and proliferation of assisted reproductive technologies.

Beyond the scope of this project, my wider research interests include reproduction and reproductive technology, temporality, chronicity and acuteness, medicalisation, human-animal studies, gender studies, and feminist theory.

Outside of this work, I currently enjoy weekly trips to the cinema, tending to my array of  houseplants, and experimenting with my own anatomical drawings and lino prints, both of which I hope to integrate into my dissertation in some way.

This project relies on literature drawn from anthropology, STS, and philosophy. The primary theoretical concepts on which my methodological, theoretical, and analytical frameworks rely are embodiment (Csordas), situatedness (Haraway), multisensoriality (Pink, Howes, Classen, Marks), and place (Casey). Within this framework I am able to enquire into the enskillment of my interlocutors (novice physicians)—their embodied and multisensory learning of anatomy—viewing the human body and bodies, as a ‘situated’ form of ‘place’.

Analytically, my thesis operates using the concepts, ‘the anatomical human body’­ (which encompasses both ‘the body’ and multiple ‘bodies’) and ‘anatomical orientation’ (the way in which students learn and situate themselves within, and embody, ‘the anatomical human body’). Here, I explore the way in which the translation of anatomical knowledge is more than the ‘teaching’ or ‘learning’ (and, accordingly, the cognitive memorisation) of the multitude of facets of human anatomy. Instead, I illustrate the way in which students come to know the anatomical body, via an embodied understanding of human anatomy, and a skilled orientation within the human body, and that it is this knowledge which is translated between educator and novice.

Empirically, my thesis relies on ethnographic material collected over the course of an academic year at Semmelweis University’s Department of Anatomy, Embryology, and Histology, in Budapest, Hungry. During my fieldwork I attended lectures, practical dissection classes, digital histology lessons, examinations, clinical rounds, Hungarian classes, and, where relevant, social activities, with my interlocutors—ensuring throughout that learning alongside (Ingold) remained the primary tenet of my methodology.