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The Schools of Nursing and Pharmacy operate on both the Oxford and Jackson campuses. The Schools of Dentistry, Health Related Professionals and Medicine, and the Health Sciences Graduate School, are based in Jackson only. (Additional healthcare programs are available through the School of Applied Sciences on the Oxford campus.) Other than these exceptions, the schools above are on the Oxford campus.

Faculty Profile

Katherine McGurn Centellas

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Sociology & Anthropology
Croft Associate Professor of Anthropology
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561 Lamar, Sociology & Anthropology
University, MS 38677
(662) 915-7421
Joined UM: August 20, 2009

Brief Bio

I received my BA in biology with a secondary concentration in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1999. I stayed in Chicago for graduate work, receiving my MA in anthropology in 2002 and PhD in 2008, both from the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago. I have been conducting fieldwork in La Paz, Bolivia since the early 2000s, focused mainly on state- level science, technology, and medical projects. I joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi in 2009. My work focuses on the field of bioscientific and biomedical research in contemporary Bolivia and how this relates to postneoliberal and pluralist processes of identity formation, knowledge production, governance, and citizenship. My book manuscript discusses the emergence of a highly localized form of scientific practice in La Paz concomitant with the rise of Evo Morales and the institutionalization of decolonizing pluralist reforms. I argue these are linked -- part of the same self-conscious revolutionary impulse -- and the overt entanglement of science with politics reworks our definition of science and scientific practice. Science here is ontologically and epistemologically relevant. We should be paying attention because it is often in locations like La Paz and elsewhere that significant innovation emerges. In addition to my research, I am committed to experiential training in social science research methods. In 2010 I helped launch the Bolivia Field School in La Paz in partnership with the Universidad Cat�lica Boliviana, and the 2017 field season will be the fourth time I have run this program. Students get hands-on social scientific and ethnographic training in La Paz and conduct original research during this program, now focused on approaches to ecological and social change, using the Andes as a test case. Alumni of the field school have used the original research they conducted as the basis for an undergraduate or graduate thesis.

Degrees

BA
Bio Science
University of Chicago (1999)
MA
Anthropology
University of Chicago (2002)
PhD
Anthropology
University of Chicago (2008)

Committee Memberships

University Standing Committee