Welcome to The Health Ethnographies Collaboratory

Ethnography is an increasingly popular methodology and method within health research

We are an interdisciplinary network of health ethnographers based in Australia. Our disciplinary backgrounds include medical anthropology, sociology, public health, crime, justice and legal studies, and more.

We collaborate to create accessible and critically reflexive resources setting out the sensibilities, approaches, opportunities, challenges and diverse types of ethnography within health research. This Collaboratory aims to elucidate the possibilities and value of ethnographic methods, methodologies, and modes of writing for health research.

This website offers access to published resources, outlines current conversations, and highlights planned projects.

We welcome feedback, conversation, and collaboration.

co-convenors

  • Catherine Trundle

    Catherine Trundle is a medial anthropologist in the Public Health Department of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on heat stress and climate justice, contested illness, ethnographic research methods, and the ethics of wellbeing. Her poetry and flash fiction have been anthologized and published in a range of Australasian literary journals, and her work seeks to explore and experiment with the intersections of creative and ethnographic methods.

    Catherine Trundle

  • Tarryn Phillips

    Tarryn Phillips is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor of Crime, Justice and Legal studies in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University. Drawing on ethnographic research methods, Tarryn's interdisciplinary research examines how structural inequalities shape health and wellbeing in Australia and the Pacific. Her ethnographic novel with Edward Narain, Sugar, is published through University of Toronto Press (2024).

    Tarryn Phillips