Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson
Dr Kelly Fagan Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology and Subject Manager (Anthropology) for the MPhil in Health Medicine and Society in the Department of Social Anthropology.
Kelly’s research focuses on disabilities, communication, inequalities, social access, and public policy. Her work foregrounds the ways that individual histories, bodies, sensorial hierarchies, education, and experiences of formalised care can generate epistemic dissonances and injustices for people.
During her social anthropology doctoral research (University College London), entitled Looking to Listen (ESRC/AHRC multidisciplinary Public Policy and Heritage studentship, 2018), she investigated institutional reception of – and oftentimes resistance to – deaf-centred communication practices. The broader remit of her research focuses on the ways that social relations contribute to categories of personhood (e.g. disabled, autistic, migrant), and how these definitions inhibit knowledge-making. I am interested in how embedded perceptions of difference contribute to inequalities and can influence assessment processes and value judgements within UK institutions and internationally. Her Leverhulme ECR fellowship ‘Communication Faultlines on the Frontlines‘ (2021-2024) investigated the limits of communication between individuals and institutions. It has led to Kelly founding the youth-centred citizen social science methods programme: ‘ABC’ (www.anthropologybychilden.org).
Kelly lectures on ‘non-normal’ ways of being in the world, techniques of multimodal attention, and analysis as ways of thinking through the complex constitution of communication differences and related exclusions and injustices. She holds an NVQ 6 in British Sign Language.
Research Interests
Medical and Biosocial anthropology; Sensory anthropology; Anthropology of Institutions; Disability ; Deafness; Social effects of epistemic dissonances and injustice; Communication and affordance theory; Inclusive multimodal methodologies.
Select publications
- Inaccessible Access: confronting barriers to epistemic inclusion (Rutgers University Press, Pub date: 15.11.2024 https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/inaccessible-access/9781978841451/)
- Medicine Anthropology Theory special section Summer 2025, Special Section “Beyond Voice” Kelly Fagan Robinson and R. Jones McVey eds. https://www.medanthrotheory.org/mat/article/view/10901
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan. “Not burning, but rebuilding: The ABCS of anthropology using multimodal methodologies and DEAF values.” Multimodality & Society 4, no. 4 (2024): 468-487.
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan. “The Present as Legibility”, In “Back to the Present” edited by Timothy P.A. Cooper, Michael Edwards & Nikita Simpson, American Ethnologist website (01.26.2024), [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/collections/back-to-the-present/the-present-as-legibility/]
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan. “Knowing by DEAF‐listening: Epistemologies and ontologies revealed in song‐signing.” American Anthropologist 124, no. 4 (2022): 866-879. Original English (12.2023) and British Sign Language translation (10.10.2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13746
- Robinson, K.F. (2023), Jelena Tošic & Andreas Streinzer (eds). Ethnographies of deservingness: unpacking ideologies of distribution and inequality. x, 437 pp., bibliogrs. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. £107.00 (cloth). JRAI. (https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13973)
- SMRU: David Burrows, Martin Holbraad, John Cussans, Kelly Fagan Robinson, Melanie Jackson, Dean Kenning, Inigo Minns, Lucy Sames, Hermione Spriggs, Mary Yacoob. “C30: Morphologies of agents of the pandemic SMRU” (in Lockdown Cultures: The arts & humanities in the year of the pandemic, 2020-21, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Maurice Biriotti (10.11.2022). https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800083394
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan & Timothy Carroll, “The material ecologies of policy failure.” Handbook of Failure: Contributions from Sociology and Other Social Sciences. Adriana Mica, Anna Horolets, Mikołaj Pawlak and Paweł Kubicki, eds. (29.11.2022). ISBN: 9780367404048
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan & Ignacia Arteaga, “Who are the ‘hard-to-reach’ and for whom?” in Cancer and the Politics of Care: Inequalities and interventions in global perspective. Lenore Manderson, Linda Rae Bennett and Belinda Spagnoletti, eds. (01.02.2023). ISBN: 9781800080744
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan, I. Arteaga & M. McDonald. “Covid: How to ‘track and trace’? Look for the super-locals” British Medical Journal (BMJ) Editorials. (https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/09/10/covid-19-test-and-trace-look-for-the-super-locals-to-access-hard-to-reach-groups/ 10.09.2020).
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan. “The Form that Flattens” in Parkhurst, Aaron and Timothy Carroll, eds. Medical Materialities: Toward a Material Culture of Medical Anthropology. Routledge, (2019). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429457081
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan. “Conscious Artistic Translanguaging,” Applied Linguistics Review, 10(1), pp.73–92. (2019). https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2017-0079
- Robinson, Kelly Fagan. “Flynn, Alex & Jonas Tinius (eds). Anthropology, theatre, and development. xiv, 368 London: Palgrave, 2015” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2016). https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12508
Books/Special Section under review
- Monograph: ‘Looking to Listen: individual ‘turns’ in DEAF space and the worlds they conjure’ (Rutgers University Press forthcoming 2026)
Media
- The Cancer Research Podcast: “Ask me anything about… Risk: communicating across disciplines” (https://soundcloud.com/crukcamcentre/risk-communicating-across-disciplines)
- Routledge Promotional video: “Material Ecologies of Policy Failure” (https://youtu.be/aZOd13ATL_8)
- Risks: Learning to Share MOOC– (https://crukcambridgecentre.org.uk/education-and-training/elearning/risk-learning-to-share)
Select awards
- Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Department of Social Anthropology (PI), 2021-2024
- International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection/CRUK skills exchange (PI), 2020-2022
- British Academy Advanced Newton Fellowship: UFRGS, Brazil and UCL, 2018-2022
- ESRC/AHRC Multidisciplinary PhD Studentship (Public Policy and Heritage), 2013-2018
Affiliations
- Department of Social Anthropology: Assistant Professor, Medical Anthropology (https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-kelly-fagan-robinson)
- Health, Medicine, and Society MPhil: Anthropology Subject Manager, Lecturer (https://www.hms.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/Kelly-Fagan-Robinson)
- International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection (ACED/CRUK)
- Max Planck–Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change: Associate (http://maxcam.socanth.cam.ac.uk/index.php/media/)
- Social Morphologies Research Unit (SMRU) (https://spacestudios.org.uk/events/morphologies-invisible-agents)
