Biography
My teaching and research sits at the intersection of conversations about the mind, care, and ethics. I focus in particular on adults with significant 'intellectual disabilities' - that is, cognitive impairments that place them in need of dedicated care throughout their lives. What are the consequences of lacking some of the crucial mental abilities we tend to take for granted in our lives and our relationships? What does adulthood mean for those who depend on the intimate care we typically associate with childhood?
I explore these questions through comparative ethnographic research in the UK and India. My research in the UK focuses on the ethical life of a care home for adults with intellectual disabilities that is run by a Christian charity called L’Arche: the moral dilemmas of care work, the complexities of intimate relationships that go beyond the contractual, and the possibility of being becoming as an equal adult in contemporary Britain while still relying on dedicated support.
I also work with adults with intellectual disabilities and their families in South India where I am exploring how changing kinship relations open up new problems and solutions to questions about who cares for these individuals throughout their lives.
This research forms the basis of my teaching on care, religion, dependence, disability, cognition, and ethics; and it also takes me to Kerala where I am affiliated with the Mahatma Gandhi University of Kottayam and the Kerala Council of Historical Research in Thiruvananthapuram.
Research
Anthropology of Religion
Anthropology of Christianity
Medical Anthropology
Anthropology of Care
Anthropology of Disability
Intellectual and Mental Disability
Psychological Anthropology
Dependence and Welfare
Anthropology of Ethics
Moral Philosophy
The Ethics of Care
Publications
McKearney, P. (2020) Experiments in Friendship in Ford, D. & Randall, I. (eds.) ‘A Kind of Upside-Downness’: Learning Disabilities and Transformational Community. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. https://www.jkp.com/uk/a-kind-of-upside-downness.html
McKearney, P. (2019) Everyday Ethics in Lamb, M. and B. Williams (eds.), Everyday Ethics: Moral Theology and the Practices of Ordinary Life. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvqmp43t
McKearney, P. (2019).The Ability to Judge: Critique and Surprise in Theology, Anthropology, and L’Arche. Ethnos. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1640261
McKearney, P. (2019). The Ethics of Care. EASA Network of Ethnographic Theory. https://networkofethnographictheory.wordpress.com/2019/06/24/the-ethics-of-care/
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 36(1), 1–22.https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2018.360102
Teaching and Supervisions
SAN3: Anthropological Theory and Methods
Belief and the Anthropology of Christian Life
SAN5: Ethical Life and the Anthropology of the Subject
Personhood, Cognition, and Ethics
SAN13: Gender, Kinship, and Care
Disability, Dependence, and Care
