Culture, health & inequality

A concern with inequality brings together scholars across anthropology's fields whose research highlights the social, cultural and historical context of inequalities of age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, racialization, health and wealth.  Faculty seek to bring the tools of anthropology to enable ways of achieving more equitable futures in the context of the legacy of colonialism, capitalism, financialization and industrialization. 

With faculty expertise on capitalism, finance, political economy, alternative monetary forms, health and social inequality, a prominent focus in this thematic area is the critical analysis of disparity and creative efforts to redress it. This theme likewise draws special attention to struggling, agency, imagination and thriving among marginalized and vulnerable populations. 

Faculty researchers

• Rachel Brown

• Tatiana Degai

• Dzifa Dordunoo
• Tommy Happynook
• Helen Kurki
• Alison Murray
• Daromir Rudnyckyj 

Recent publications

2026 - Haw J, Senga J, Dordunoo D, Tinga B. Systemic barriers to donation for African, Caribbean and Black communities: A qualitative key informant study. Transfusion Medicine. 2026; 1-9.

2025 - Epp H, Dordunoo D, Dompierre KA, Cundiff V, McBride C, Magassa M. Using Simulation-based
Education to Enhance Anti-racism Learning in Nursing. Rev. Enferm. Contemp., Salvador, 2024;13:
e5770.

2024 - Brown, Rachel. Food and Religious Minorities. Religious Minorities Online. De Gruyter.

2024 - Brown, Rachel. A Remembrance of Dishes Past. In Fabricating Authenticity, edited by Jason W.M. Ellsworth and Andie Alexander, 34-38. Sheffield and Bristol: Equinox.

2023 - Brown, Rachel and Aldea Mulhern. "Muslim Foodways and Pop Culture: Beyond Halal, Boundary Maintenance and SAME Cuisine." Co-authored with Aldea Mulhern. In Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Pop Culture, edited by Kristian Peterson and Hussein Rashid, 113-128. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

2023 - Cowgill, L., Harrington, L., MacKinnon, M., Kurki, H. Gains in relative cortical area during growth and their relationship to nutrition, body size, and physical activity. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 182: 177-193.

2022 - Brown, Rachel. ’To Be or Not to Be’ Religious: Minority Religion in a Region of Nones. In Religion at the Edge: Nature, Spirituality and Secularity in the Pacific Northwest, edited by Paul Bramadat, Patricia O’Connell Killen, and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, 203-221. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

2022 - Kurki, H., Holland, S., MacKinnon, M., Cowgill, L., Osipov, B., Harrington, L. Appositional long bone growth: Implications for measuring cross‐sectional geometry. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 179(2), 291-306. 

2021 - Brown, Rachel. Cooking up Research: Positionality and the Knowledge Production of Islam(s). In Producing Islam(s) in Canada: On Knowledge, Positionality, and Politics, edited by Amélie Barras, Jennifer Selby and Melanie Adrian, 223-240. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.