Julie Spray

Dr. Julie Spray is an interdisciplinary medical and childhood anthropologist whose research traces intersecting health issues from public policy to children’s perceptions. Integrating biosocial, ethnographic and visual arts-based methods, her work advocates for greater inclusion in health policy of those marginalised by dominant social structures and values, particularly children, adolescents, and disadvantaged communities. She uses collaborative drawing, ethnographic illustration, and comics to convey the embodied and spatial-relational dimensions of childhoods, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and research encounters. She is a lecturer in Children’s Studies at the University of Galway, where she leads the Borderlands study of epistemic recognition in interdisciplinary spaces.

Check out her website: juliespray.com

Select Publications

Spray, J. (2022). What Does Drawing Do for the Anthropology of Childhood. Graphic Ethnography on the Rise. www.culanth.org/fieldsights/what-does-drawing-do-for-the-anthropology-of-childhood

Spray, J. 2023. “Drawing Talks.” NEOS 15 (2).  https://acyig.americananthro.org/neosvol15iss2fall23/spray/