Ellen Foley

Professor, Sustainability and Social Justice

Ellen Foley is a medical anthropologist whose research addresses the social production of disease with a focus on how intertwined global, national, and local social forces shape vulnerability to disease, health status, and access to medical care, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Her scholarship examines the processes by which social and economic changes articulate with existing hierarchies of gender, class, and generation to produce conflicts that are largely unseen and misunderstood by dominant development and health discourses. She focuses on the lived experience of illness and suffering as well as the intimate household politics of gender inequality and managing health and sickness in resource-constrained environments.

Degrees

  • Ph.D. in Anthropology, Michigan State University, 2002
  • M.A. in Anthropology, Michigan State University, 1998
  • B.A. in Anthropology, Kalamazoo College, 1994

Affiliated Departments

Sustainability and Social Justice, Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies (CGRAS)

Scholarly and creative works

  • Article in Refereed Journal

    Sex, Love, and Study Abroad: The Impact of Intimate Relationships in Study Abroad Outcomes

    Published in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
    2024
    Ellen E. Foley, Dinah Hannaford
  • Book

    Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health

    2024
    ISBN #ISBN 9781032256375
    Ellen E. Foley, Tsitsi Masvawure
  • Article in Refereed Journal

    In Pursuit of the Demographic Dividend: The Return of Economic Justifications for Family Planning in Africa

    Published in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters
    2022
    Ellen E. Foley
  • Article in Refereed Journal

    The innovation imperative in global health: gendered futurity in the Sayana® Press. 

    Published in Medicine Anthropology Theory
    2022
    Vol. 92
    Issue #2
    Maggie MacDonald, Ellen E Foley
  • Article in Refereed Journal

    The Innovation Imperative in Global Health: Gendered Futurity in the Sayana® Press

    Published in Medicine Anthropology Theory
    2022
    Vol. 9
    Issue #2
    Margaret E MacDonald, Ellen E. Foley
  • Article in Refereed Journal

    Advisor-Advisee Feminist Relational Mentoring

    Published in Feminist Anthropology
    2020
    Hasnaa Mokhtar, Ellen E. Foley
  • Chapters In Books

    Legislating Sexuality in Africa: Human Rights, Society, and the State
    Chapter: Colonial Legacies, Electoral Politics, and the Production of (Anti) Homosexuality in Senegal

    Published by University of Wisconsin Press
    2020
    Cheikh I Niang, Ellen E. Foley, Ndack Diop
  • Chapters In Books

    Gender and Sexuality in Senegalese Societies: Critical Perspectives and Methods
    Chapter: Radical Inclusion and the Life of a Public Intellectual: A Conversation with Cheikh Ibrahima Niang

    Published by Lexington Books
    2019
    Ellen E. Foley, Cheikh I Niang