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, biopolitical thought, 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 Medical History.
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 titled Capture/Recapture: Race, Health, and Population in Malawi that draws on archival materials and longterm ethnography. The book analyzes three moments of health crisis as they played out in Malawi (early 20th century epidemics of sleeping sickness, mid 20th century panics over malnutrition, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic), considering how and through which material forms and devices 'population' became a knowable thing, a container for calculations and data production, and a tool for governance. In so doing, the book aims to describe in great detail how racial discourse co-constitutes projects carried out in the name of health, safety, and improvement. The book puts forward an analytic of capture/recapture (also the name of a peculiar population size estimate technology used to count 'elusive' populations) to intervene in and complicate the dominant lenses of bio- and necro-politics that have been employed to make sense of how populations are managed, regulated, and governed. Thinking through population discourse and interventions in a single place over the longterm reveals that African health projects in the past and present, while indeed matters of life and death--matters of the body, were also fundamentally driven by logics of capturing, measuring, and surveilling African labor, land, and knowledge. Throughout, the book troubles the body-centric and narrow definitions of health and the metrics and techniques of quantification that undergird public and global health projects today by attending to how health and the body continue to be measured and constructed through racial discourse that naturalizes new genres of ongoing capture.
In collaboration with Nicole Dalmer (Health Aging & Society, McMaster) and with support from 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, data-experiences, and technology life-stories. 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, pickleball, and gardening. Before joining McMaster, they taught for eight years in the wonderful Anthropology Department at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Affiliations
Board Member (Liaison Officer), American Ethnological Society
Board Member (Member-at-Large), Society for Medical Anthropology
Editorial Board Member, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
