Cal Biruk

Overview

Cal Biruk’s research interests are at the intersection of medical anthropology, critical global health studies, and critical data studies. Biruk is, along with Nicole Dalmer, a co-applicant on a grant examining the datafication of aging, and how data and technologies such as wearables produce new kinds of relations, self-fashioning, and configurations of care and harm. They are especially interested in the materialities, relations, and engagements that constitute older adults’ experiences of data and data objects. Their larger body of research and work examines the datafication of global health through the lens of technologies of audit and quantified metrics of health in southern Africa, examining shifts in ways of measuring and understanding ‘health’ since the colonial period. They are also working on a project, in collaboration with Lyndsey Beutin, that centers the experience of Type 1 diabetics who engage with surveillance and navigate datafication as part of diabetes care protocols in North America. They are the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (2018) and numerous articles in journals such as Critical Public Health, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, American Ethnologist, and Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. They are also working on a co-authored book that examines the practices, politics, and history of recreational birding, under contract with Duke University Press.

Affiliations

• Associate Professor
• Faculty of Social Sciences, McMaster University
• Associate Professor, Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences
• Board Member (Liaison Officer), American Ethnological Society
• Editorial Board Member, Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Education

• BA, with honors, Bryn Mawr College
• PhD, University of Pennsylvania
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University