A York University Initiative
Alexandra Vieux Frankel
Alexandra Vieux Frankel is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at York University and a research fellow in the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health. Her research examines water safety and the afterlives of industrial contaminants in Milwaukee, WI. Her work centres the labour of activists and advocate coalitions to reimagine public health to include water as a more-than-human being. Drawing on anthropologies of toxicity and blue humanities, this research traces the entanglements of de/industrialization, settler colonials, and structural violence alongside contaminants that move through human and more-than-human bodies.
In collaboration with the Frictions in Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine research team, Frankel co-authored a methods paper exploring the intersections of arts-based research methods and sensory ethnography in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods and contributed to articles appearing in the Journal of Liver Transplantation (2022; 2023). She has a co-authored an original research article on the affective demands of curative imaginaries in transplant medicine, forthcoming in the Frontiers in Sociology: Sociology of Emotion. And she is co-editor of a special section in Catalyst: Feminism Theory and Technoscience that examines transplant temporalities through Critical Disability Studies lenses. Frankel has worked as an editor for the Anthropology News magazine. Her writing as also appeared in Anthropology and Humanism and Fieldsites: Visual and New Media Review.