Contact Information
Biography
I am a cultural anthropologist working in the fields of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, visual anthropology, and Southeast Asia Studies. My research centers on Cambodia, which I argue is an important place for thinking through postcolonial and Cold War histories in contemporary medical, technological, and visual practices. I theorize these practices as care and repair, which relate to both health care specifically but also a more general understanding of care for the self and collective that involves ongoing repair of infrastructures, relationships, and beings. I have developed my research questions, methods, and commitments in three different directions: medical imaging and visual practices of health care in Phnom Penh; Cambodia as a site of experimental global health sciences; and experiments in collective care in Cambodia and the U.S. My book, Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh (2022), was published by UW Press.
I teach about the anthropology of technology, multimodal anthropology, Southeast Asia, and sociocultural theory. I am core faculty in the Medical Anthropology & Global Health (MAGH) program, a thriving undergraduate track in the Department of Anthropology, and the Center for Southeast Asia & its Diasporas (CSEAD).
For the 2022-2023 academic year I was on sabbatical, conducting research on the puzzle of antimalarial drug resistance in the Thai-Cambodia borderland, and teaching in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.
Research
Selected Research
- Grant, Jenna. 2024. The barrette: Unlikely humanitarian images and practices of repair. In Care in a time of humanitarianism: Stories of refuge, aid, and repair in the Global South. Arzoo Osanloo and Cabeiri Robinson, eds. Pp. 222-237. New York: Berghahn. Download PDF
- Grant, Jenna. 2023. Fixing things, moving stories. In The Ethnographic Case, 2nd edition, edited by Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski. Mattering Press. http://doi.org/10.28938/9781912729340
- Grant, Jenna. 2022. Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom Penh. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
- Grant, Jenna. 2021. Portrait and scan. Public Culture 33 (3 (95)): 349–369.
- Grant, Jenna. 2020. Repair in translation. East Asia Science, Technology and Society (EASTS) 14: 15-33. https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-8233535 Download PDF
- Grant, Jenna. 2018. Friends, partners, and orphans: Relations that make and unmake a hospital. Medicine Anthropology Theory 5(2): 56-72. doi.org/10.17157/mat.5.2.533
- Alarilla, Adrian, Jenna Grant, and Judith Henchy. 2017. The age of the Kampuchea picture. Video installation, text. Download PDF
- Grant, Jenna. 2017. "Cambodian pathology": Imagining modern biomedicine in the Cambodian-Soviet medical journal, Revue Médico-Chirurgicale de l'Hôpital de l'Amitié Khméro-Soviétique (1961-1971). In Translating the body: Medical education in Southeast Asia. Hans Pols, C. Michele Thompson, and John Harley Warner, eds. Pp. 194-229. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.
- Grant, Jenna. 2017. How to rename a hospital: Biomedical technologies and new combinations of business and charity in Cambodian public health. Anthropological Quarterly 90(3): 605-636. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2017.0038
- Grant, Jenna, 2017. 'Not all suffering is illness; some suffering is political': The ambit of radical care. Anthropology Now 9(2): 126-128. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2017.1338078
- Grant, Jenna. 2017. Review of Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 23: 203-205.
- Grant, Jenna. 2016. Fixing things, moving stories. Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2016/07/fixing-things-moving-image-stories-into-case-stories.html (accessed September 7, 2016).
- Grant, Jenna M. 2016. From subjects to relations: Bioethics and the articulation of postcolonial politics in the Cambodia Pre-exposure Prophylaxis trial. Social Studies of Science 46(2): 236-58. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306312716632617
- Grant, Jenna. 2015. Screening room: Collecting in the collection. Visual and New Media Review, Cultural Anthropology website, January 14. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/628-screening-room-collecting-in-the-collection
- Emma Kowal, Todd Meyers, Eugene Raikhel, Peter Redfield, Sharon Abramowitz, Barbara Andersen, Eileen Moyer, Emily Yates-Doerr, and Jenna Grant. 2015. The open question: Medical anthropology and open access. Medicine Anthropology Theory 2.1: 75-94. doi.org/10.17157/mat.2.1.216
- Majano, Veronica, Dolissa Medina, and Angela Reginato. 2015. Shooting the shit with La Caca Colectiva. Interview by Jenna M. Grant. Other Zine. Other Cinema 32 (Spring). http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/shooting-the-shit-with-la-caca-colectiva/
- Grant, Jenna M. 2014. Technology, magic, anthropology, Cambodia. International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter 69 (Autumn): 13. https://iias.asia/the-newsletter/newsletter-69-autumn-2014
- Grant, Jenna M. 2013. Government official. In Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity. Joshua Barker, Erik Harms, and Johan Lindquist, eds. Pp. 89-90. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.