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.

In her academic career at the University of Otago, Wardell teaches courses such as 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, and ANTH 490 Dissertation. She received an Otago Teaching and Learning Grant in 2019 to develop resources for bridging students into Social Anthropology, which resulted in the AnthNav website. Wardell is the author of the forthcoming book Ethnography: The Basics, an interdisciplinary introduction to ethnographic methods, published by Routledge in 2025. Her key publications include Naming and framing ecological distress (Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2020), To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown (BioSocieties, 2023), A critical analysis of trans-visibility through online medical crowdfunding (Social Science & Medicine, 2024), and Bees hope: Poetic reflections on theorising hope in a more-than-human world (New Zealand Sociology, 2024). Her work has advanced understandings of digital affect, care practices, and ecological emotions in anthropology.