Sandra Hyde

Biography

Sandra Hyde joined the McGill Faculty in 2002.  Her research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on critical public health and the cultural politics of epidemics, which are key areas with practical implications for understanding power, inequality, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Her book Eating Spring Rice was the first ethnographic study on AIDS in China that drew on over a decade of research in Yunnan Province. The book combines innovative public health research with in-depth ethnography on the ways that sex workers and ethnic minorities were marked as the principle carriers of HIV, despite evidence to the contrary, in a former suzerain state called Sipsongpanna (in southern China).  Her second book is a co-edited volume, Postcolonial Disorders, focusing on the nature of subjectivity, everyday modes of experience, and the social and psychological dimensions of individual lives, and the forms of subjection found in diverse places where medical anthropologists work. Her current book project - Chasing the Dragon – follows her clinical ethnography on the management of drug users at the China’s first residential Therapeutic Community in Southwest China. The book narrates the stories of peer educators, residents and doctors who devise an alternative program to manage illegal and recreational drug users in the midst of China’s current psychology boom.   

Research Interest

She has two new projects: 1) An oral history of medicine through the life of Dr. June Pauline Brady, and her remaining 1950’s female cohort at Cambridge University Medical School; and, 2) an ethnography of diaspora Chinese environmental activism through the lens of activists who immigrated to Canada and those who remain in China.