Dr Rebecca Lynch

I’m an anthropologist with an interest in bodies and in biomedicine and biomedical sciences, and how these are 'made' and categorised in different contexts.

I am Lecturer in Medical Anthropology and the Anthropology of Science based at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) and Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences | Egenis, Centre for the study of Life Sciences | University of Exeter . I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London (UCL). My research draws on examples of different topics (often within biomedicine) to explore the dynamic, changing, fluid body and its boundaries, moral aspects of health and medicine, and (bio)medical categorisations (including those created through notions of risk and health technologies).

Taking the body as always situated and contingent, in the process of becoming and being ‘made’, my work includes a focus on the role of the more-than-human (technologies, bodily fluids, spirit agents, material ‘stuff’) and attends to embedded values and assumptions particularly in relation to moral framings, hierarchies and power dynamics, and the creation/widening of health inequalities. Rather than gathering ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ accounts of health, illness and the body and applying these to, or viewing these as separate from, biomedical constructions, I am interested in the dynamic interchanges and co-constitute entities and relationships through which health, illness, bodies, and biomedicine itself are created.

I have undertaken fieldwork with Evangelical Christians in Trinidad (the subject of my 2020 monograph ‘The Devil is Disorder’, published by Berghahn) and on biomedical constructions of the body and health in different settings in the UK (particularly within public health and in the care and management of chronic conditions).

I have three ongoing and inter-related areas of work: fluid bodies (pieces of work exploring the body through fluids and ideas of fluidity), bodies and environments (exploring relationships and the flows between bodies and environments, health and place, and how these are understood within biomedicine and the biomedical sciences) and biomedical categorising (pieces of work exploring classifications and what these ‘do’). I am co-investigator (leading the social science element) on two NIHR-funded projects allowing me to explore these ideas through caring for liver disease and novel technologies to monitor asthma symptoms.

I am co-editor of the 'Health, Technology and Society' book series with Prof. Martyn Pickersgill (published by Palgrave), a member of the editorial board of Anthropology and Medicine, and recently served on the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI).

I lead the Bodies, Environments, Inequalities Group (BEIG) and co-lead Egenis' Mind, Body and Culture Research Stream with philosopher Prof. Giovanna Colombetti. I teach on the MA Cultures and Environments of Health as well as contributing to other teaching on the body, health and illness and research methods within SPSPA.

List of publications can be found here: Rebecca Lynch - Google Scholar

Research supervision:

I welcome hearing from students interested in conducting PhD work that speaks to any of my research interests, particularly where there is a focus on bodies, biomedical categories/classifications and structures, and/or exploration of health technologies.