The New and Exciting Use of Digital Anthropology For Public Health
Digital anthropology as a field is fairly new and seeks to use anthropological theories and methods to understand how people are interacting with digital aspects of today’s world. The field is broad and encapsulates everything from the use of Facebook in rural India, through societal conceptions of big data, and the ethics of AI. Follow Ada into the exciting field and her meandering route into key research examining use of the digital in international development and public health.
I decided to apply for Oxford’s Archaeology and Anthropology course based on dinner table conversations I had with my parents’ friends who ran the archaeology department at Cambridge. I remember them posing the question of how one might go about reconstructing early human thought patterns, using stone tools as a proxy. I had been toying with the idea of applying for geography or human sciences - I knew I wanted to do something that focused on humans, and/or social science. Once I’d become interested in arch and anth, I made sure that I’d read some of the foundational texts listed on the Department website, but I also ended up reading some more specific ones purely for my own enjoyment. I was lucky enough to live in a city with a large anthropology museum, where I applied to do a short internship, which ended up coming in useful in my interviews, as it meant I was a little familiar with some of the material I was shown. I’d also had a few relevant internships and travel experience under my belt at that point, as I applied in the beginning of my gap year. These not only made me think about how anthropology applied to the ‘real world’, but also gave me examples to drawn upon in my application.
Whilst I was studying anthropology I became really interested in how one could study ‘the digital’ using anthropological methods and theories. I found the idea of understanding the use of social media platforms such as Facebook and how they were being used and perceived in different countries (especially LMICs) fascinating, and saw anthropology as an obvious way of interrogating such things. Further, I had work experience in digital health, and sexual and reproductive health, and I was curious to explore how digital devices (mobile phones) could be used as a platform for sexual and reproductive health information in low-resource settings - this is what I spent my time researching for my undergraduate thesis. My undergraduate thesis looked at the efficacy of mobile phone-based initiatives for family planning information in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the ways in which the design of services and use of mobile phones impact efficacy. Using existing literature, I focused on the reasons for an unmet need for contraception within Sub-Saharan Africa, and the ways in which mHealth was being used to address this need, and the main challenges in practice. I was particularly interested in how the framing of information could affect how it was received by groups of women with different contraception needs, for instance spacing births versus preventing first pregnancy. I decided to do a Master’s in digital anthropology with the intention of going into research around digital health interventions, as well as more broadly learning how to research ‘the digital’ using ethnographic techniques (relating to the scientific description of people, societies and cultures).
For my MSc dissertation I researched the use of mobile phones for self-tracking and how mHealth is being framed in contrast to and within current healthcare infrastructures in the UK. This included several months of fieldwork in London with health technology start-up founders, NHS clinicians, venture capitalists and mHealth users. I focused on the ways in which self-management of health using mobile phones changes people’s sense of personal responsibility, and how this may lead to a fractured relationship between individuals and public health care systems. After I graduated from UCL, I worked for an ethnographic consulting firm called ReD Associates, based in Copenhagen. Whilst there, I was on a project looking at advanced Parkinson’s treatment in the German healthcare system. This included conducting ethnographic research with Parkinson’s patients, their families and neurologists. By this point I realised that health care research is where my interest really lay, and I was reluctant to continue onto other projects that weren’t in this field. On my current Master’s in Public Health at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), I am planning to conduct fieldwork in Uganda, looking at refugee sexual and reproductive health and opportunities for digital interventions. I decided at that point to apply for a PhD, but I had missed the funding deadlines (in January). I reached out to a potential supervisor with my research idea, and she agreed to support me in applying for the PhD and funding the following year. In the meantime, I was speaking to contacts I had in roles that I could imagine wanting to go into, working in international development and public health and the message I was getting from all of them was that in order to go into implementation I’d need a Master’s in public health. I had a vague idea of the sort of organisations I may want to work for such as WHO or Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and knew that a lot of their staff had gone to LSHTM, so I decided to apply. The Wellcome Trust is a research charity based in London, established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome, to fund research to improve human and animal health. Today the Wellcome Trust is one of the major funders for health and biomedical research. They have a Master’s studentship scheme which covers fees, research and a London living stipend, run at various institutions, one of which is LSHTM, where they fund a place on the Public Health MSc.
My own experience was that it took leaving academia to realise that I wanted to go into academic research. Previously I had been quite ‘anti’ academia (with two academics for parents!) as I thought it was unable to have real world impact. However, in the field I want to go into, the research is very much geared towards having an impact, especially at LSHTM which has strong partnerships with many of the largest public health agencies and governments. Research can be very exciting and engaging and gives you the opportunity to really dive into an area you are interested in, with the intention of coming out with insights that can be put into practice. For me, one of the driving factors was talking to people I had interned with about how they got where they are, and realising that a lot of them had taken an academic route, before moving into more senior positions in large development or health agencies and think tanks.
I came out of university thinking there was a clear path ahead of me, only to find that in the years working towards getting ‘there’ I’d changed, and it wasn’t what I wanted anymore. This led to a bit of chopping and changing in my first year after my MSc at UCL, which at the time was really stressful, but it was in that chaos that I had to get serious about what I wanted to be doing and where and started making choices again. It may sound like it was a linear route, but there was a whole lot of panic and change and long, long phone calls with my parents along the way. It is so important to speak to people - my mum was always encouraging me to reach out to those I admired to seek some guidance and mentorship, and when I started doing this it a) became clear there was no ‘right’ way of doing things and b) I realised that for the most part, people don’t mind being reached out to for mentorship - in fact, it can be quite flattering. I ended up having Skype calls with people I’d never met before, that went on to really inform my choices. It’s really important that we support other women particularly, as mentors, but also just as allies - I’ve benefited so much from these sorts of relationships, and look forward to when I can offer the same back to others. My final words for those deliberating over course or life choices is to go easy on yourself, none of these decisions are final, you can change your mind if you need to. It’s easy to get really hung up on timelines, but more and more I’m realising that these really don’t matter. It’s about setting up a life for yourself, and that involves some trial and error, don’t be afraid of it.
Interested in learning more about Ada’s involvement in the field of the digital? Why not take her online masterclass:
