Annie McCarthy is currently an Assistant Professor in Global Studies at the University of Canberra. After finishing her PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University in 2016, she taught at the ANU in the Anthropology, Development Studies and Gender Studies programs, before commencing her appointment at the University of Canberra as an Assistant Professor in Global Studies in July 2018. Since arriving at the University of Canberra she has taught a range of courses in Global Studies, International Development as well as in the Arts core. She has also supervised honours students on a range of topics 

• Children’s Participation in Development: 

My doctoral thesis Under Development: Stories of Children and NGOs in Delhi, India explored the way a group of slum children aged between 12 and 16 navigate the multiplicities and contradictions of development in NGO saturated Delhi.  Awarded the 2017 Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) John Legge Prize for a PhD thesis on an Asian Studies topic, Under Development draws on children’s texts and performances to analyse and make concrete everyday experiences of development and marginalisation. This work will be published with Routledge in 2021 in a book entitled Children and NGOs in India: Development as Storytelling and Performance. 

More recently I have begun to build on this ethnographic research by exploring the historical dimensions of children’s participation in development both in the global south and the global north. This work involves creating an archive of child authored materials (stories, drawings, poems etc.) published in development periodicals to produce an alternative history of children’s engagement with development ‘from below.’ 

• Biomedicine and Development

I am interested in the relationship between biomedicine and development particularly the use of biomedical discourses to mark ‘deficiency’: of growth, of knowledge, of culture etc. Alongside my co-authored work with Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt on Menstrual Hygiene Management, I am also working to develop a research project that critically engages with the biomedical paradigm of stunting to explore the historical and social dimensions of this framework, alongside children’s lived experiences of growth.

• Ethical and Caring Pedagogies

Taking an auto-ethnographic approch to my own teaching, in recent yeras I have become deeply interested in ethical and caring pedagogies, and in particular questions like: what does a caring pedagogy look like in our intensely globalised neoliberal universities?