Dr Maggie MacDonald

BIO

PhD, M.A, B.A  

Margaret MacDonald is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University.  Trained as a medical anthropologist, her work explores how the cultures, actors, and objects of biomedicine, science, and technology (and their alternatives) shape our ideas and practices concerning health, illness and the body with a particular focus on reproduction. She is the author of the first monograph on licensed midwifery in Ontario, At Work in the Field of Birth: Midwifery Narratives of Nature, Tradition and Home (Vanderbilt University Press, 2007) and numerous peer reviewed articles on midwifery values and practice in Canada.  Her second major area of expertise lies in the analysis of global maternal health policy and practice and the key debates that animate this field: the controversial role of traditional birth attendants, the deployment of new biomedical and technical solutions, and the power of the visual to foment humanitarian concern and political will to tackle the issue of maternal suffering and death.  Since 2016 she has been conducting collaborative research in Senegal with an NGO that delivers maternal health programs in rural and remote areas of the country seeking to understand the humanitarian logic of their work and its impact on local health professionals and community members. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming landmark volume, Global Maternal Health Policy: From Policy Spaces to Sites of Practice due out from Springer early next year. 

Maggie is a collaborator on this project and thrilled to be involved in such  timely and important research that speaks to the reproductive justice orientation that has animated her academic career and holds the potential to affect change at the level of community and health policy.