Laura Meek

Laura Meek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community, Culture, and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, situated on Syilx Okanagan Nation Territory. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research centers on counterfeit pharmaceuticals, bodily epistemologies, and the politics of healing in East Africa. Prior to joining UBC in 2022, she was a faculty member at the University of Hong Kong's Centre for the Humanities and Medicine.

Dr. Meek received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis, an MA in Women's Studies from George Washington University, and a BA in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago. Her academic journey includes significant fieldwork experience in Tanzania and Hong Kong, with additional professional experience in the nonprofit sector focusing on prison abolition, women's empowerment, and environmental conservation.

Her research interests span a wide range of topics including Africa, Black studies, bodily epistemologies, counterfeits, critical public health, cultural anthropology, decolonization, disease elimination, ethnography, feminist STS, fugitivity, global health, Hong Kong, leprosy, medical anthropology, ontology, pharmaceuticals, postcolonial technoscience, sensoriums, storytelling, Tanzania, temporality, and traditional medicine. Her work is characterized by a commitment to addressing structural inequalities in knowledge production and advancing liberatory social transformation.

Dr. Meek's publications reveal consistent engagement with decolonial approaches to medical anthropology, pharmaceutical studies, and global health. Her recent work explores themes of fugitive science, bodily epistemologies, and the politics of healing across multiple contexts including Tanzania and Hong Kong. She has developed innovative frameworks for understanding counterfeit pharmaceuticals not merely as public health challenges but as sites of world-making innovation and radical uncertainty.

• 2021 MAE–MAT Early Career Paper Award
• 2021 Creative Ethnographic Prose Competition, 3rd Prize
• 2020 Early Career Scheme Grant & Award (Hong Kong)
• 2018 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award
• 2017 Rudolf Virchow Graduate Student Award

Dr. Meek supervises M.A. and Ph.D. students through UBC Okanagan's Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies programs in Global Studies, Power Conflict and Ideas, and Community Engagement, Social Change, Equity. She is also the Co-Director of Storying Otherwise: A Hub for Creative Ethnographic Writing and serves on the Steering Committee for the UBC-O Science and Technology Studies Collective. Her teaching encompasses cultural and medical anthropology, African & Africana studies, global health, embodiment, feminist/anti-racist/decolonial STS, global studies, and post/anticolonial theory.