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Department OfMedicine, Health, and Society

Kenneth MacLeish

Director of Undergraduate Studies
Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society; Associate Professor of Anthropology

Ken MacLeish, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health & Society and Anthropology. His research focuses on bodily and emotional experiences of contemporary war; the emergence and contestation of war-related health problems; and the framing of “disorderly” military life in policy, veteran care practices, and American public culture. Ken work covers topics including military suicide, posttraumatic stress disorder, moral injury, civilian casualties, the politics of counterinsurgency, representations of war in American politics and public culture, military pollution and toxic exposure, and veteran involvement in the carceral system. His scholarship has appeared in the journals Medical Anthropology, BioSocieties, Theory, Culture & Society, Security Dialog, Cultural Anthropology, History of the Human Sciences, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Critical Military Studies, and Ethnos, as well as the American Journal of Public Health. He is the author of the award-winning Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013), which explores how contemporary war-making takes shape in the everyday and intimate lives of the servicemembers, veterans, families, and care providers whose labor produces post-9/11 US wars. His in-progress book, Veteran Disorder: Care and Ex-Military Life (Princeton University Press), shows how structural forces intersect with lay and medical ideas about normalcy to shape veteran lives, especially when veterans themselves become figured as sources of social disorder. Ken is also at work on a co-authored book with anthropologists Zoë Wool and Kali Rubaii about the health and environmental consequences of US military burn pits and the broader formations of military pollution of which they are a part.

Ken teaches classes on medical anthropology, US health politics, war and embodiment, trauma and memory, surveillance and security, and qualitative research methods. He is a member of the interdisciplinary Somatosphere editorial collective and the Costs of War research collective, and a former chair of the Vanderbilt University Press editorial committee.

Specializations

  • Cultural and medical anthropology
  • Critical military and security studies
  • Science and technology studies
  • War in American culture
  • Contested illness, toxicity, and environmental violence

Representative Publications

Current Projects

  • Veteran Disorder is an ethnographic monograph examining the complex everyday pressures and structural underpinnings of post-military life for veterans in a military community in the US south. Centered on a veteran treatment court—a local civilian court in which veterans charged with minor offenses can forego jail time by participating in a supervised therapeutic program—the book traces ethnographically grounded ideas about care, violence, intimacy, and the good life through individual veterans’ and veteran advocates’ narratives and trajectories.
  • The Global Psyche is a collaborative project with fellow faculty member Prof. Dominique Béhague that brings together cutting-edge anthropological engagements with the globalization, adaptation, and refusal of psychiatric knowledge. Beginning with a competitively funded 2017 workshop hosted at Vanderbilt, the project has now taken the form of linked special issues of the journals Medical Anthropology Quarterly and Theory, Culture & Society collecting globally diverse, cutting-edge scholarly work on this topic.
  • Burn Pits: Illness and the Toxic Infrastructure of War is a collaboration with Prof. Zoë Wool (Department of Anthropology, Rice University) and a team of undergraduate researchers at Vanderbilt examining the experiences of veterans and workers exposed to the fumes from burning waste disposal pits on US installations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Exposees, along with their advocates and survivors, confront ambiguous diagnostic status, patchy environmental data, and bureaucratic reticence in their search for official recognition and compensation, and the practice of burning war zone waste raises fundamental questions about the nature of war-related violence and injury.

Representative Publications

  • 2022, The Psyche of Counterinsurgency. Theory, Culture and Society 39(6): 63-86.
  • 2022, (with Zoë Wool) Pollution as War Violence. Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights (Cultural Anthropology), January 25. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/burn-pits-us-military-waste-as-war- violence.
  • 2020, (with Dominique Béhague) Introduction: The Global Psyche. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34(1): 5-20.
  • 2020, Care and the Non-human Politics of Veteran Drunk Driving. Cultural Anthropology 35(10): 23-30.
  • 2020, “Churn”: Mobilization-Demobilization and the Fungibility of Ex-Military Life. Security Dialogue 51(2-3): 194-210.
  • 2019, Fieldnotes on the Politics of Veteran Care. Ethnos. 86(4): 654-675.
  • 2019, Damaged and Deserving: On Care in a Veteran Treatment Court. Medical Anthropology 39(3): 239-254.
  • 2019, Imagining Military Suicide. In War and Health, Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino, eds. New York: New York University Press.
  • 2019, How To Feel About War: On the politics of military psyches in the age of counterinsurgency. Biosocieties 14(2): 272-99.
  • 2018, (with Zoë Wool) US Military Burn Pits and the Politics of Health. Critical Care blog, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, August 1. http://medanthroquarterly.org/2018/08/01/us-military-burn-pits-and-the-politics-of-health/
  • 2018, On “Moral Injury”: wounds, politics and personhood in US military behavioral health. Journal of the History of the Human Sciences 31(2):128-146.
  • 2018, Drive Carefully. In American Interiors, by Matt Casteel. Pp.91-95. London: Dewi Lewis.