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Biruk Cal, Associate Professor

Areas of interest: socio-cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, global health, critical data studies, queer studies

Biography

Cal Biruk (she/they) is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Cal is the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke University Press, 2018). The book draws on ethnographic work in Malawi to trace the social lives of quantitative health data collected by population scientists and shows how data reflect and cohere new social relations, persons, forms of expertise, and economies. Cal is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Critical Public Health, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Medicine Anthropology Theory, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Critical African Studies. Cal’s research and teaching interests include medical anthropology, critical global health studies, feminist STS, anthropologies of quantification and data, histories of anthropological theory, and queer/trans studies. 

Cal’s current work with an LGBT-rights organization in Malawi tracks the emergence of ‘key populations’—as knowledge object, target for global health interventions, and site of affective, activist, and monetary investment—in Africa. Taking the global focus on key populations amid the so-called ‘end of AIDS’ in Africa as entry point, Cal is working on an ethnographic history of the concept of ‘population’, and the relations, technologies, and ways of knowing it coheres. Drawing on long-term ethnography and analysis of colonial archival sources, the project seeks to excavate the submerged racialized ontologies of global health’s metrics, concepts, sociotechnical infrastructures, and technologies, and considers how they have produced imaginaries and valuations of African health.  

In collaboration with Nicole Dalmer (Health Aging & Society, McMaster), Cal is working on a project that critically examines the datafication of aging and maps Canadian older adults’ dataspheres and data-experiences. In collaboration with Lyndsey Beutin (Communication Studies & Media Arts), Cal is beginning a project that employs media ethnography, visual analysis, and interviews to critically analyze the normative, racialized, and number-centric definitions of 'health' upheld by diabetes care protocols in North America. Cal enjoys travel, running, birding, hiking, and gardening.    

Affiliations

Board Member (Liaison Officer), American Ethnological Society

Editorial Board Member, Medical Anthropology Quarterly

 

Education

BA, Bryn Mawr College, 2003

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2011

Teaching

 

Courses 2022-2023

Fall:

  • ANTHROP 706 - Bodies, Politics, Data

Winter:

  • ANTHROP 2HI3 - Medical Anthropology
  • ANTHROP 4LL3 - Critical Global Health

Courses 2021-2022

Fall:

  • ANTHROP 3ST3 - Science and Technology Studies in/of Africa
  • ANTHROP 4LL3 - Critical Global Health
  • ANTHROP 701 - Readings: Cultural Anthropology

Winter:

  • ANTHROP 3HI3 - Medical Anthropology
  • ANTHROP 706 - Bodies, Politics, Data

 

Research

 

Selected publications :  

Books   

2018   Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Duke University Press.    

2016   Biruk, C and Khosi Xaba, eds. Proudly Malawian: Life Stories of Lesbian and Gender Non-Conforming Individuals in Malawi. MaThoko’s Books. Johannesburg, South Africa.   

 Special issues of Journals  

2019    Biruk, C. and R. McKay. “Objects of critique in critical global health studies.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 6(2):142-150. (co-edited)  

 Journal Articles and Book Chapters   

2022       Biruk, C. “Capture-recapture: Biopolitical entanglements and the making of ‘key populations’ in global health worlds in Malawi.” American Ethnologist 49(4):549-562.  

 2022       Biruk, C. "Assembling population data in the field: Technologies and materialities of quantification." In Bruun, et al, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave (pp. 309-329).   

 2022       Biruk, C. "COVID containers in pandemic mediascapes: Discursive economies of health, bodies, and race in North America." Anthropology & Medicine 29(3):305-322.  

 2021       Biruk, C. "The politics of global health. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 44(2):161-180.  

 2020       Biruk, C. “Fake gays in queer Africa: NGOs, metrics, and modes of (queer) theory.” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 26(3):477-502.   

 2020       Biruk, C. “The invention of ‘harmful cultural practices’ in the era of AIDS in Malawi.”  Journal of Southern African Studies 46(2):339-356.   

 2020     Biruk, C. and Gift Trapence. “Community engagement in an economy of harms: reflections from an LGBTI-rights NGO in Malawi,” in Reynolds, Lindsey and Salla Sariola, eds. The Ethics and Politics of Community Health Research. London, UK: Routledge.    

 2019     Biruk, C. “The MSM category as bureaucratic technology: Reflections on paperwork and project time in performance-based aid economies.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 6(4):187-214.   

 2019     Biruk, C. “Soap: Touching objects, feeling critique in critical global health studies.” Medicine Anthropology Theory 6(2):151-164.    

 2018  Biruk, C. and Gift Trapence. “Community engagement in an economy of harms:  Reflections from an LGBTI-rights NGO in Malawi.” Critical Public Health 28(3):340-351.   

2017  Biruk, C. “Ethical gifts?: An analysis of soap-for-information transactions in Malawian survey research worlds.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(3):365-384.   

 2016  Biruk, C. “Studying up in critical NGO studies today: Reflections on critique and the distribution of interpretive labour.” Critical African Studies 8(3):291-305.   

 2014  Biruk, C. “Aid for Gays: The Material and the Moral in ‘African Homophobia.’” The Journal of Modern African Studies 52(3):447-473.   

 2014  Biruk, C. Ebola and emergency anthropology: The view from the “global health slot.” Somatosphere. Available at http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/ebola-and-emergency- anthropology-the-view-from-the-global-health-slot.html.   

 2012  Biruk, C. “Seeing like a research project: Producing ‘high-quality data’ in AIDS research in Malawi.” Medical Anthropology 31(4): 347-366.   

 2009   Biruk, C. and Pierson Ntata. "The challenges of doing gender research in developing countries." Journal of Comparative Social Work 4(1):56-70.  

 2009  Watkins, Susan, Ann Swidler, and Crystal Biruk. 2009. “Hearsay Ethnography: A Method for learning about responses to health interventions,” in Pescosolido, B. et al, eds. The Handbook of Sociology of Health, Illness and Healing. Springer.   

 2008  Biruk, Crystal and Dana Prince. “Subjects, Participants, Collaborators: Reading community in public health literature.”  International Feminist Journal of Politics 10(2):236-246.   

 2008  Wittink, Marsha, Britt Dahlberg, Fran Barg, and Crystal Biruk. “How older adults combine medical and experiential notions of depression.” Qualitative Health Research 18: 1174-1183.   

 Other  

2022    Beutin, Lyndsey and Biruk C. Sick Futurity: A Zine. In DIY Methods, Sept 2022, 40 pp. Peterborough, ON: Low-Carbon Research Methods Group, http://lowcarbonmethods.com/DIYmethods2022.html. (also available at H-commons).  

2021     Biruk, C. "AMAA on Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World." Somatosphere http://somatosphere.net/2021/amaa-on-cooking-data.html  

2021    Biruk, C. "Conversation on Cooking Data." Communication, Media, Performance (CaMP) Anthropologyhttps://campanthropology.org/2021/06/07/crystal-biruk-cooking-data/  

2020    Biruk, C. “Normative anti-normativity?” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(2):633-636. [Book symposium on Kenyan, Christian, queer: Religion, lgbt activism, and arts of resistance in Africa].  

2019     Biruk, C., R. McKay, and N. Tousignant. “Book Forum: Cooking Data, Medicine in the Meantime, and Edges of Exposure” [Author discussion]. Somatosphere http://somatosphere.net/2019/book-forum-cooking-data-medicine-in-the-meantime-edges-of-exposure.html/   

2017  Biruk, C. and Gift Trapence. “Gay for pay in an economy of harms: Reflections from an LGBTI-rights NGO in Malawi.” Anthropology News 58(2):e238-e242.   

Reviews (selected)  

2021 Review of The Uncounted: Politics of Data in Global Health (Sara L.M. Davis). Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35(4):93-96.   

2020 Review of Desire Work: Ex-Gay and Pentecostal Masculinity in South Africa (Melissa Hackman). Canadian Journal of African Studies 54(3):577-586.  

2020 Review of Politicizing Sex in Contemporary Africa: Homophobia in Malawi (Ashley Currier). American Historical Review 125(3):1124-1125.   

2018 Review of Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa (Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, eds). American Anthropologist 120(4):867-868.  

2018 Review of The Lives of Community Health Workers: Local Labor and Global Health in Urban Ethiopia (Kenneth Maes). Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32(1).   

2017 Review of Para-States and Medical Science: Making African Global Health (Paul Wenzel Geissler, ed). The Journal of African History 58(2).  

2015 Review of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism (Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal, eds). American Ethnologist 42(1).