Dr Rosalie Jones McVey

www.rosiejones0.wordpress.com

Social and medical anthropologist, Research Fellow at Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter.

My research focuses on ethics, morality and power in relation to the different ways that people think about the concept of ‘mind’. This includes the minds of others, such as animals, children, and those who are mentally ill or neurodivergent. I am interested in the way understandings of ‘mind’ shift through time and across different places, transforming as they move through different cultural contexts, but also shifting in relation to different technologies and tools for recording and measuring minds. These different understandings of mind play out in real-world impacts in systems of training, education, treatment, management and care.

I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology in 2019 at Cambridge University, under the wonderful supervision of Matei Candea. I then took up a position as a Teaching Associate at Cambridge, and then was lucky enough to be awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge 2019-2023. I am now a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, based at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, at Exeter.

I became interested in different understandings of mind during my first career as a horse trainer. I was lucky enough to travel the world learning from other horse people (which I have written about in a book, GlobeTrotting), and giving demonstrations of training methods with the renowned horse trainer Kelly Marks. I became the youngest ever Recommended Trainer of Intelligent Horsemanship association at age 21, and was the first woman to ride un-backed and remedial horses in Monty Roberts demonstrations. My horse training years have granted my grit and tynacity, but also a solutions-based outlook, clarity of communication, and a lifelong bunch of friends.