Maggie MacDonald

Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

Faculty Fellow

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Maggie MacDonald, PhD, is associate professor and graduate program director in the Department of Anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada. As a medical anthropologist, her interests lie in how cultures of biomedicine, science, and technology shape ideas, practices, and materialities of gender, health, and reproduction. She conducts research in a range of settings across the globe: with midwives and their clients in Canada; within a community of global maternal health advocates and policy makers; and in rural and remote Senegal where non-governmental organisations implement interventions to improve maternal health. Her work in the global health arena has focused on key debates and emerging tools in the campaigns to improve maternal health care and reduce maternal death in low resource settings: the controversial place of traditional birth attendants in maternal health; the production and uses of photography, film and infographics as affective, aesthetic information about sexual and reproductive health; and the emergence of new biomedical-technical solutions embedded in feminist politics. She currently leads a collaborative project looking at the work of midwives and the experiences of clients under COVID with particular attention to the impacts of the pandemic on marginalized and racialized groups. She is co-editor of the recent volume Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health: From Policy Spaces to Sites of Practice.

Research keywords:

Medical anthropology; global health; maternal and reproductive health; health technologies; midwifery; self-care agenda.

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