Cal Biruk (she/they) is Associate Professor of Anthropology. They are the proud winner of the McMaster Student Union's 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award (Faculty of Social Sciences). Cal’s research and teaching interests include medical anthropology, critical global health studies, feminist STS, anthropologies of data, histories of anthropological theory, and queer/trans studies. 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 American Ethnologist, Body & Society, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Critical Public Health, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Medicine Anthropology Theory, Journal of Modern African Studies, and Critical African 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. Drawing on long-term ethnography, the project excavates 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 and vulnerability. As part of this collaboration, they co-edited a collection of life stories shared by lesbian and gender-nonconforming Malawians, titled Proudly Malawian (Ma'Thoko's Books, 2016).
Cal is working on a book project that takes interest in the long history of 'health' as caught up in complex multispecies ecologies in Malawi. The book explores how efforts to improve African health in the past and present have been projects of active capture, captivity, and extraction (of resources, human and animal populations, labor) rather than ones of neglect or exclusion. It takes particular interest in how tools and technologies of quantification emerged in and through understudied collaborations between medical practitioners and experts in animal health (entomologists, veterinary scientists, wildlife ecologists, e.g.) who were navigating scientific uncertainty amid the emergence of 'new' health problems in a marginal outpost of British empire. The book traces how these quantification projects and ways of knowing were entangled with racial capitalism, and how they reappear in present day efforts to estimate the population size of men who have sex with men (MSM) and animal conservation projects alike. Other case studies to be explored in the book include early-mid 20th century efforts to count and catch tsetse flies that spread sleeping sickness to human and animal populations and the early emergence of 'appropriate technologies' in nutrition research in the 1940s.
In collaboration with Nicole Dalmer (Health Aging & Society, McMaster) and the Aging in Data (AiD) group, Cal is examining the datafication of aging by employing creative methods to map and visualize Canadian older adults’ dataspheres and data-experiences. In collaboration with Lyndsey Beutin (Communication Studies & Media Arts, McMaster), Cal is working on 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. Check out Sick Futurity, the zine they co-authored, if you're interested in this work (free download on Instagram @sickfuturity).
Finally, Cal is the co-author (with Greta LaFleur, Yale University) of a book titled Birding (under contract with Duke University Press) that explores the pleasures and politics of birdwatching.
Cal enjoys travel, running, birding, tarot, making soap, hiking, and gardening.
Affiliations
Board Member (Liaison Officer), American Ethnological Society
Board Member (Member-at-Large), Society for Medical Anthropology
Editorial Board Member, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
