Professor
Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 1999

Professor MacDonald is a medical anthropologist specializing in gender and health with particular interests in women's reproductive health. Her book, At Work in the Field of Birth: Midwifery Narratives of Nature, Tradition and Home (2008), is an ethnographic account of contemporary midwifery in Ontario in the wake of its historic transition from the margins as a grassroots social movement to a profession in the public health care system in the 1990s. Her current research endeavour is an anthropological study of the Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI) a high profile, international reproductive health policy launched by the WHO, the World Bank and UNFPA with the goal of significantly reducing maternal mortality worldwide.