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. 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). In the wake of the sudden withdrawal of huge pots of USAID funding for AIDS-related research with most vulnerable populations such as LGBT Malawians , they are documenting the afterlives of global health in Malawi. Drawing on archival research, grey literature and policy analysis, two decades of ethnographic work, and oral histories, this project will document how LGBT lives, practices, and bodily material have been made into data over the long term, how AIDS research and interventions have produced new economies, identities, and politics, and how what has been called the ‘end of global health’ in one of the most intensely datafied and over-researched locales in the world is playing out.
Cal is working on a book project, titled Capture/Recapture: Race, Health, and Population in Malawi. The book draws on two decades of ethnographic fieldwork among researchers and projects collecting quantitative health data in Malawi and on archival research to tell a story of how “population” becomes a knowable thing, a container for statistical calculations and data production, and a site of intervention and governance. To do so, it rigorously analyzes three moments of health crisis in Malawi: early twentieth century epidemics of sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), mid-twentieth century colonial panics over African malnutrition, and high rates of HIV prevalence in “key populations” in the last two decades. The book conceptualizes the long history of experimentation and scientific inquiry in Africa as a layered endeavor, repurposing (or recapturing) infrastructures, labor forces, technologies, and calculative tools in line with shifting priorities and understandings of African health and biopolitical interests.
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 as Critique (under contract with Duke University Press) that explores the queer 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
