Cheryl Mattingly
Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California
About the Speaker:
Cheryl Mattingly’s major interests are the anthropology of ethics (especially virtue ethics and the ethics of care), medical anthropology, phenomenology and hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, narrative, chronic illness and disability, the culture of biomedicine, health disparities, race and minority health. Her primary research has been in the United States.
Some recent awards and honors include an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University, Denmark (2018) a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017-2018), a Dean's Influential Visiting Scholar of Social Science, UCLA (2016) and a Dale T. Mortensen Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Aarhus University (2013-2015). She has been the PI and Co-PI on multiple large federally funded research grants (primarily from NIH) studying minority health in the United States. Most significantly, these enabled a fifteen-year ethnographic study following the lives of African American families raising children with chronic illnesses and disabilities in both clinic and home settings. She has published extensively on this research, including two books: The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Cultural Borderland (2010), which was awarded the 2011 Stirling Book Prize (Society for Psychological Anthropology) and Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (2014), which received the 2015 New Millennium Book Prize (Society for Medical Anthropology).
Her initial research in medical anthropology focused on the culture of biomedical rehabilitation and the clinical treatment of disability and chronic illness from narrative and phenomenological perspectives. She has a longstanding interest in intersections between anthropology and philosophy (especially moral philosophy and phenomenology), and in thinking through a philosophical anthropology deeply informed by ethnography. Currently, she is working on a book provisionally titled Category Trouble: Stigma and Moral Experience. This book is both a foray in critical phenomenology and a writing experiment in which she is exploring how to create compelling non-fiction short stories that also have theoretical and existential resonance. Her aspiration is to rethink stigma on multiple levels: as a personal (and intimately interpersonal) lived experience, as a social marker of marginalized groups, and as a feature of the human condition. |
