Our Authors

Meet our contributors.

Lyndsey Beutin

Lyndsey Beutin is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University and Visiting Research Scholar in African American Studies at Princeton University (2023-24). Her research focuses on the racial politics of media, technology, and social justice activism. She is the author of Trafficking in Antiblackness: Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, and Racial Justice (Duke, 2023). She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2001 and has been an early adopter of many terrible diabetes technologies, including the first generation of continuous glucose monitors.

Cal Biruk

Cal Biruk is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. They identify as a “5.5er ally” (someone whose blood glucose hovers around 5.5mmol/L but loves and lives with a type 1 diabetic). Their interests are at the intersection of medical anthropology, STS, and queer studies. They are the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke, 2018) and numerous articles in journals including American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Critical Public Health, and Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. They spend a lot of time birding.

Sandra Calkins

Sandra Calkins is Associate Professor of Environment, Technology and Decolonial Knowledge within the Faculty of Behavioural, Management, and Social Sciences, University of Twente. As an anthropologist of science, she studies how knowledge about the environment comes to matter and shapes the health and futures of collective life. She is committed to thinking from, with and alongside particular lives, both human and more-than-human, relationships and worlds.

Thomas Cousins

Simon Cousins is the Clarendon-Lienhardt Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology of Africa, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. He is an anthropologist of southern Africa with a particular interest in health, labour, and kinship, especially nutrition and pharmaceuticals and their attendant forms of value and life. His fieldwork to date has been in South Africa on topics including global health surveillance, welfare, communications technologies, and zoonosis.

Véra Ehrenstein

Véra Ehrenstein is a statutory member and researcher at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux (CEMS), Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. An engineer by training, she completed a thesis in the sociology of science and technology at the Centre for Sociology of Innovation at the École des Mines in Paris. Her current research focuses on how the climate crisis is transforming the life sciences, particularly so-called tropical forestry ecology and engineering in Central Africa.

Christos Lynteris

Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His research focuses on zoonotic diseases from anthropological and historical perspectives. His latest book is Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography (MIT Press, 2022).

Thorben Peter Høj Simonsen

Thorben Peter Høj Simonsen holds a PhD from the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. Before taking up a position as Researcher at the Danish Center for Social Science Research, he was an Assistant Professor at the IT University in Copenhagen, affiliated with the Technologies-in-Practice research group. His research interests converge around the role of space and place in healthcare. Previously he has studied the implications of so-called “healing architecture” for psychiatric practice, focusing on the role of the built environment. Increasingly, the role of digital technologies in healthcare, specifically immersive technologies like virtual reality, are the focus of his research.

Branwyn Poleykett

Branwyn Poleykett is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam. She specializes in the study of public, global, and planetary health and has conducted the majority of her research in the West African city of Dakar, in Senegal.

Noémi Tousignant

Noémi Tousignant is Associate Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. She came to UCL in 2018 with a Wellcome Trust University Award. She previously held postdoctoral positions at the Université de Montréal, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge. Her recent book, Edges of Exposure (Duke 2018), was awarded the Society for Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Award for 2020.

Miriam Waltz

Miriam Waltz is assistant professor in gender justice and health technologies with a joint appointment between the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology and the African Studies Centre, Leiden University. Her research will focus on the development of an interdisciplinary hub on health technologies in Africa.