Janelle S. Taylor joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto in summer 2019. As a medical anthropologist, she uses concepts and methods from sociocultural anthropology to study social and cultural aspects of health, illness, and medicine. Her research has been based in North America and has focused on a number of different aspects of medicine including: fetal ultrasound imaging, advance care planning and medical decision-making at the end of life, conceptualizations of “culture” within medical education, the use of Standardized Patient simulations to teach clinical skills to medical students, and more. She has worked with physician colleagues on a number of health research teams exploring questions related to advance care planning, and is involved with several interdisciplinary research teams based in Denmark and the Netherlands. Recently, much of Dr. Taylor's research has attended to questions relating to dementia, including: practices of recognition and caring; exclusion of people with dementia from geriatrics research; and friendship in the face of dementia. She recently held (as PI) a grant from the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) to support research using existing medical research and health records data to shed light on the situation of older adults with dementia who do not have family available to provide caregiving support. She is the author of a prizewinning scholarly book, co-editor of a scholarly volume, and author or co-author of numerous articles appearing in journals of medicine and medical education as well as medical anthropology and cultural anthropology. A thread running through all of Dr. Taylor's research is a concern to document and understand how ideas, words and images have material force in the world; how “persons” are socially made (and unmade); and how medicine and health care are involved in all of this.

https://anthropology.utoronto.ca/people/faculty/janelle-taylor/