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Senior Lecturer

ContactSusan Wardell

Room 5C25
Tel +64 3 479 8790
Email susan.wardell@otago.ac.nz

Research interests

  • Sociocultural perspectives on health, mental health, and disability
  • Social media, digital sociality, embodiment and phenomenological approaches to the digital
  • Emotion and emotionality, moral emotion, the politics of emotion, collective emotion, affect theory, affect among digital publics
  • Mediated and online responses to suffering; care, empathy, compassion, memory and memorialisation
  • Neoliberalism and moral relations; care work and nonprofits, charity and giving, online medical crowdfunding
  • Mental health in the anthropocene, climate anxiety/ecological grief, epistemologies of climate change, ecological emotions
  • Everyday religion and spirituality (esp. Christianity), secular spirituality
  • Creative ethnographic methods; ethnographic poetry, ethnographic flash, visual anthropology, art, performance, experimental ethnography

Courses

  • ANTH 105 Global and Local Cultures
  • ANTH 312 Cultural Politics
  • ANTH 325 Rites of Passage: Death, Grief, and Ritual
  • ANTH 328 The Anthropology of Religion and the Supernatural
  • ANTH 423 Bodies, Technologies and Medicines
  • ANTH 424 The Anthropology of Evil

Background and interests

Susan's PhD (2015) was completed across the fields of Social Anthropology and Communication Studies, at the University of Otago, with major interests in medical and psychological anthropology, moral anthropology, and the anthropology of religion. Her research comprised of a comparative ethnographic study of burnout, in two Christian youth work organisations; in Christchurch, New Zealand, and Kampala, Uganda. She published her book: 'Living in the Tension: Care, selfhood, and wellbeing among faith-based youth workers' in 2018. This more recently generated an applied resource on ‘Self Care’, produced in collaboration with the Presbyterian, released 2024 https://www.pym.org.nz/self-tending-resource

Susan was involved as a Research Assistant and co-author on the (2010–2014) Marsden Grant Project: 'Troubling Choice. Exploring and explaining techniques of moral reasoning for people living at the intersection of reproductive technologies, genetics, and disability' ( PI s Ruth Fitzgerald, Julie Park, Mike Legge). Her main contributions focused on Down Syndrome, disability and prenatal genetic testing, and the representation of these within New Zealand media. This led to an offshoot project examining a viral media campaign for a baby with Down Syndrome, in 2015, spurring ongoing interests in care and moral reasoning in digital spaces.

Susan expanded this interest when awarded a Marsden Fast-Start grant (2020–2023) for a project entitled 'Medical Crowdfunding in New Zealand: Illness, Giving, and Moral Emotion'. The project analysed campaign pages, as well as conducting case studies and interviews, with both campaigners and audiences/donors. It led to a range of academic publications, two technical reports, and a variety of other creative and public outputs, including a public symposium.
Crowdfunded Care

In 2019, in response to the Christchurch mosque shootings, Susan also began a smaller project around 'online care’ following the attacks. In 2020 she gained a UORG grant, titled “Remembering together: an ethnographic study of the one-year anniversary of the Christchurch mosque attack” to lead on from this with a focus on both material and digital practices of memorialisation around this event. This connected back to some wider writing on memory and memorialisation in Christchurch, including in the Red Zone.

Susan is interested in public anthropology, and contributes regularly to media writing, for The Spinoff and other news and media outlets. She was also the PI for a small applied project funded by InternetNZ, in 2022 (co-led by Melanie Beres, Fairleigh Gilmour, and Cassie Withey-Rila) and which focused on equipping social media admins, from community groups, to respond to dangerous speech. This produced a fully illustrated (and fully free) public resource: The tagging in project.
Visit the tagging in project website

She is also deeply engaged with creative anthropology/ethnography. She publishes creative writing in both academic and literary spheres, having won a variety of national and international awards for poetry, flash fiction, and essay. She serves as the Poetry Editor for the Anthropology and Humanism journal, and as the chair of the SHA Ethnographic Poetry Prize committee. In 2023 she was invited to deliver the Ursula K Le Guin Keynote Creative Performance, at the Centre for Creative Ethnography’s ‘Around the Fire’ Symposium. She is currently expanding her interest in visual art and material practice (working variously with painting, photography, and stained glass art), and in performance. Susan is the Deputy Director of the multidisciplinary Performance of the Real research theme at Otago

Susan is passionate about teaching and completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from 2018-2019, focusing her research on 'emotional pedagogies' for dark or troubling topics. She secured an Otago Teaching & Learning Grant in 2019 , to research a kit of resources to 'bridge' students from other disciplines, into the field of Social Anthropology. This was developed into the publicly-available AnthNav website. This led Susan to the development of an interdisciplinary and introductory book ethnographic methods, due out with Routledge in April 2025.

Visit the AnthNav website

Ethnography The Basics (Routledge)

Current projects

Susan’s current research and writing is focused on moral life and ecological emotion in the anthropocene, drawing primarily on autoethnographic and digital ethnographic methods, as well as creative and multimodal practice. This area of interest has generated several creative publications, and a performance installation entitled ‘Cartographies of a Future’ (co-directed by the members of the ‘Performance of the Real’ research theme) which was nominated for two awards in the 2023 Dunedin Fringe show. During her RSL in 2024, Susan participated in and led several workshops on ecological distress/emotion, around the UK.

She is also working on a co-edited anthology of ethnographic poetry, to provide a resource for other teachers and researchers.

Current supervision (primary supervisor)

Yi Li. Exploring Geographic Happiness Through an Ethnography of Migrants Engaged with Eco-Creative Practices in Iceland and New Zealand

Shannon Blanch. Doing death differently? A digital ethnography of Aotearoa New Zealand death talking communities

Jayden Glen. The Funny Side of Embodying a Comedic Identity: Exploring the significance of cultural identity in the experiences of Māori Stand Up Comedians in New Zealand

Completed supervision (primary supervisor)

Jordan Green (2020). Māori Instagram: The Social Media Lifeworlds and Decolonising Practices of Rangatahi Māori

Samuel McComb (2020). Transformation in Outdoor Education: An anthropological exploration of instructors facilitating client change at TSB TOPEC

Ellan Baker (2020). Creating Success, Finding a Busy Balance: Understandings and Experiences of Student Burnout Among Undergraduate University of Otago Students

Miriam Buhler (2020). “We're all watching each other”: Bodies, risk, and sociality in a Dunedin supermarket during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown

Athena Macmillan (2019). "Our Bodies Hold Our Stories": How do University of Otago Science students negotiate notions of personhood in relation to cadaveric material, as part of their learning practice?

Etienne Devilliers (2019). A Paradox of Purpose: Embodying identity, and resisting or supplementing western epistemologies, through the teaching of Māori stories in a Dunedin primary school

Yi Li (2019). Improvising Life: An ethnographic study of theatrical improvisation as part of the pursuit of happiness and wellbeing, among three New Zealand troupes [Winner of the Richard Kamman Wellbeing Prize, 2020]

Jayden Glen (2019). Examining Identity Politics Through the Career of New Zealander Taika Waititi

Asia Brownlie (2018). Embodied ink: tattooing and the negotiation of fluid feminine identities in New Zealand

Publications

Wardell, S. (2024). Bees hope: Poetic reflections on theorising hope in a more-than-human world. New Zealand Sociology, 39(2), 42-46. Retrieved from https://www.saanz.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Wardell_Bees-hope_NZS-392_42-46.pdf Journal - Research Article

Wardell, S. (2024). Drowning in blue light. In E. van Roekel & F. Murphy (Eds.), A collection of creative anthropologies: Drowning in blue light and other stories. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-55105-5_2 Creative Work

Wardell, S., & Withey-Rila, C. (2024). A critical analysis of trans-visibility through online medical crowdfunding. Social Science & Medicine. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116682 Journal - Research Article

Wardell, S., Starling, L., & Withey-Rila, C. (2024). Fat and deserving: Navigating the visibility and visuality of non-normative bodies in online medical crowdfunding. Fat Studies, 13(1), 79-98. doi: 10.1080/21604851.2023.2283955 Journal - Research Article

Neuwelt-Kearns, C., Baker, T., Calder-Dawe, O., Bartos, A. E., & Wardell, S. (2024). Getting the crowd to care: Marketing illness through health-related crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Environment & Planning A, 56(1), 311-329. doi: 10.1177/0308518X211009535 Journal - Research Article

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