Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Kelly Robinson's research focuses on disabilities, communication, inequalities, social access, and public policy. Her work foregrounds the ways that individual histories, bodies, sensorial hierarchies, education, and experiences of formalised care can generate epistemic dissonances and injustices for people.

During her social anthropology doctoral research (University College London), entitled Looking to Listen (ESRC/AHRC multidisciplinary Public Policy and Heritage studentship, 2018), she investigated institutional reception of – and oftentimes resistance to – deaf-centred communication practices. The broader remit of her research focused on the ways that social relations contribute to categories of personhood (e.g. disabled, autistic, migrant), and how these definitions inhibit knowledge-making. She is interested in how embedded perceptions of difference contribute to inequalities and can influence assessment processes and value judgements within UK institutions and internationally.

She lectures on ‘non-normal’ ways of being in the world, techniques of multimodal attention, and analysis as ways of thinking through the complex constitution of communication differences and related exclusions and injustices. She holds an NVQ 6 in British Sign Language.

Her Leverhulme ECR Fellowship project, Communication Faultlines on the Frontlines (2021-2024), charted and analysed the ways that individual experiences, bodies, and moral judgments contribute to specific definitions of value and social action. She continues to work with young people and their extended social and educational networks to facilitate a citizen-science, multimodal approach called ABC: Anthropology By Children. Anthropology By Communities (https://www.anthropologybychildren.org).

She convened inReach – /ɪn riːtʃ/ (2023-2024), supported by the CRASSH (2023-2024) ‘Art in the ARB’ grant scheme. The term ‘inReach’ signifies any action which reshapes elite institutions as inclusive domains through centrally placing work by people otherwise absent in traditional arts and academic spaces. This series will critically question and therefore set to prove false the too-common trope that certain people are ‘hard to reach.’ By bringing artists, academics, and key local publics together via CRASSH, inReach amplified the underacknowledged value of lived expertise of socially marginalised people, while also fostering ongoing debates about transience, stigma and inequality in the UK (https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/38749/#programme).

As research associate and lecturer on the British Academy Advanced Newton Fellowship, “Living with Disabilities,” at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018-2023), she focused on Disability anthropology and related knowledge-making approaches. She conducted seminars and workshops in the UK and Brazil around inclusive multimodal methodologies, inequality, and marginality in various global contexts for multilingual audiences (spoken and signed languages).

Her work on the Cancer Research UK project, 'Elusive Risks', helped to re-contextualise the category of 'hard-to-reach’ populations within the contexts of cancer, risk and care. This project has facilitated greater understanding of various seldom-heard peoples' concerns about screening and other early detection programmes, as well as more effective use of existing community networks in contact-tracing initiatives during the Covid19 pandemic. This led to her collaboration and skills exchange with Manchester University risk prediction modellers to develop an online learning tool, ‘Shared Risk’, for use by fellow academics and interested publics, thinking together about how different disciplines contribute to divergent but complementary definitions of risk.