Dr Elizabeth Turk

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Wolfson College
  • Affiliated Researcher
  • Affiliated Lecturer
  • Junior Research Fellow, Wolfson College
  • Office hours: appointment by email
Dr Elizabeth Turk

Contact

About

I am a social anthropologist with foundational training in women’s studies. My research takes an historically inflected approach to the study of power relations and health-related practices. At the intersection of medical anthropology, political anthropology, and environmental humanities, my forthcoming monograph Therapeutic Nature: modernist cosmologies, concept work, and the making of healing traditions in contemporary Mongolia is based on my doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge (2018). The book ethnographically explores the body, national identity, and natural environment as they relate to dynamic regimes of value in Mongolian public life.

I have designed and coordinated a number of research projects funded by IIE Fulbright, Henry Luce Foundation, the American Center for Mongolian Studies, UKRI, and the Wellcome Trust. I have also held a Junior Research Fellowship (2022-2025) at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

From 2020 to 2025, I worked as a Research Associate on a UK Arts and Humanities funded project entitled, Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: tracing divergent healing practices across the Mongolian-Chinese border, PI-ed by Prof David Sneath. This project traced the politics of linking health and cultural heritage, exploring the shaping effects of political economy on Covid-focused ritual practice across national borders.

Most recently, I have been awarded a Career Development Award from the Wellcome Trust for a 5.5-year project entitled, Accessing the Wellbeing Commons: therapeutic resource-ification of natural and historic environments and social exclusion in the UK and Inner Asia. This new, comparative project explores barriers to accessing therapeutic natural and historic commons in Sikkim (India), Mongolia and Devon (UK), focusing on water-based health practices to better understand how identities that tend to be associated with exclusion are made and re-made through capitalist social relations. Reflecting the project’s mixed methods approach, it is hosted by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University.

Fore-grounding critical theory in a range of sub-disciplinary contexts, l have designed, instructed and assessed undergraduate- and graduate-level anthropological theory and methods courses at Cambridge University and Columbia University in New York City. I have taught on critical issues of contemporary global life; the social, economic, political and moral aspects of development; the anthropology of post-socialist societies, and topics specific to Inner Asia.

I have also worked as Inner Asia Regional Curator of On the Move: Rethinking Nomadic Pastoralism (2022-2023), a temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Qatar exploring the lives of nomadic pastoralists in Central Sahara, Qatar, and Mongolia.

 

Research

Research interests

  • Anthropology of Mongolia and Inner Asia
  • Medical anthropology
  • Nationalism
  • Tibetan medicine
  • Medical imperialism
  • Ritual
  • Shamanism
  • Cosmology and landscape
  • Political ecology

Publications

Forthcoming:

  • Therapeutic Nature: modernist cosmologies, concept work, and the making of healing traditions in contemporary Mongolia. Ethnographic Monograph. Under Exclusive Review, Indiana University Press.
  • (with D. Sneath) Introduction. In Sneath, D. and E. Turk (eds.), Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations. Anticipated publication in Central Asian Survey December 2025.
  • Traditional Medicine, Legitimacy, and Nationalist Doxa in Pandemic-era Mongolia. In Sneath, D. and E. Turk (eds.), Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations. Central Asian Survey. Under Review.
  • (with U. Ujeed and T. White) Kinship Imaginaries of Similarity and Difference: gifts from Inner Mongols to Mongolia during the Covid-19 pandemic. In Sneath, D. and E. Turk (eds.), Pandemic Nationalism in Inner Asia: unsettling ideologies and affective imaginations. Central Asian Survey. Accepted.
  • ‘The People’s Duty to Love and Protect’: mineral springs and the moral register of changing landscapes in Mongolia. Knapp, R. and H. Havnevik (eds.) Changing Climate and Communities in High Spaces and Icy Places. Open Book Publishers. Accepted.
  • (with D. Sneath and M. Buyandelger) Introduction. In Turk, E. and M. Buyandelger (eds.) Health Connectivities: mediating medical realities in Inner Asia. Work in progress.

  • Searching for the ‘root cause’ of illness and moral aetiology in Mongolian health settings. In Turk, E. and M. Buyandelger (eds.) Health Connectivities: mediating medical realities in Inner Asia. Work in progress.

     

  • 2024     Making ‘Setgel’s Creature’ Mindful and Conceptual Change in Contemporary Mongolia. Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 11(2):1-15.
  • 2023     ‘Being Cultured’, Changing Culture: public health messaging in COVID-era Ulaanbaatar. ‘Visual Expressions of Health, Illness and Healing’ Special Issue of Curare Journal of Medical Anthropology 46(1): 29-45.
  • 2022     Herders in the ‘Age of the Market’, Mongolia: innovation and informal networks of care. On the Move: Reframing Nomadic Pastoralism. Doha, Qatar: National Museum of Qatar.
  • 2021     Transgressing National ‘Green Culture’ and the Moral Authority of Nature in ‘Age of the Market’ Mongolia. Inner Asia 23(2): 304-329.
  • 2021     (with D. Sneath) Knowing the Lords of the Land: Cosmopolitical dynamics and historical change in Mongolia. Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia: Places of Power in Changing Environments. (eds.) Knapp, R., D. Sneath and H. Diemberger. Routledge:145-164.
  • 2020     Review article: ‘Tomas Matza, Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-being in Postsocialist Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 305, 2018.’ Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 38(1).
  • 2019     The Politics of Ritual Form(ation) in Contemporary Mongolia. Social Analysis 63(3): 47-70.
  • 2019     (with Louise Walsh) ‘Ailing bodies, angry mountains, healing spirits’. University of Cambridge.
  • 2018    Toxic Care (?): Scepticism and Treatment Failure in Post-Soviet Mongolia. Inner Asia 20(2): 219-241.

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate Teaching

  • SAN 6: Power, Economy and Social Transformation
  • SAN 8: Anthropology and Development
  • SAN 10: The Anthropology of Post-Socialist Societies
  • SAN 4: The Anthropology of Inner Asia

 

Postgraduate Teaching

  • Comparative Environments, MPhil SAR specialist module (co-convener)
  • ANTHGR6124 The Politics of Modeling Social Relations, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
  • ANTHG 6070: Making Ethnography: Method & Writing, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University