Ayodele Foster-McCray

Ayodele Foster-McCray is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Working at the intersection of political and medical anthropology, as well as Black Studies and critical theory, her dissertation, “Engendering Crisis,” explores the social life of crisis in the context of the African American maternal mortality epidemic in urban and rural Georgia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a variety of invested actors across clinics, government, homes, and spaces of grassroots organizing, Foster-McCray examines how temporality, historicity, the body, and care are refracted and renegotiated in a recently articulated crisis drawing attention to the longue durée of Black women’s suffering, with particular attention to Black affective understandings of place. Foster-McCray holds an A.B. in Anthropology from Princeton University and an M.A. from Stanford University.