Rate My Professor Susan Wardell

Dr. Susan Wardell is a Senior Lecturer in the Social Anthropology programme at the University of Otago. She completed her PhD in 2015 across the fields of Social Anthropology and Communication Studies at the University of Otago, with a thesis titled Living in the Tension: Care, selfhood, and wellbeing among faith-based youth workers, published as a monograph in 2018. She also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education obtained between 2018 and 2019. Wardell's research focuses on sociocultural perspectives on health, mental health, and disability; social media, digital sociality, embodiment, and phenomenological approaches to the digital; emotion and emotionality, moral emotion, politics of emotion, collective emotion, and affect theory; mediated and online responses to suffering; care, empathy, compassion, memory, and memorialisation; neoliberalism and moral relations; care work, nonprofits, charity, giving, and online medical crowdfunding; mental health in the anthropocene, climate anxiety, ecological grief, and epistemologies of climate change; everyday religion and spirituality, especially Christianity and secular spirituality; and creative ethnographic methods including ethnographic poetry, ethnographic flash, visual anthropology, art, performance, and experimental ethnography.