Julie Spray is a medical and childhood anthropologist who works on the anthropology of child health. She researches children's perspectives on health and illness, public health policy and interventions, and health inequalities. Integrating biosocial, ethnographic and visual methods, her work advocates for greater inclusion in health policy of those marginalised by dominant social structures and values, particularly children and racially or economically disadvantaged communities. Her research has been based in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States with analyses focusing on intersecting issues of rheumatic fever, asthma, stress, infrastructure, nutrition, self-harm, mental health, disability, chronic illness, Covid-19, and health policy. Her methodological interests centre on arts-based methods, drawing, comics, and child-centred ethnography. Her current projects focus on constructions of age in asthma self-management in New Zealand, children's experiences and memories of Covid-19 in Ireland, and scholars' experiences and processes of epistemic recognition or misrecognition in interdisciplinary spaces. She is author of The Children in Child Health: Negotiating Young Lives and Health in New Zealand (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, 2020).

My ongoing research portfolio clusters under three main themes:

The anthropology of child health. This tranche of my scholarship bridges traditional biosocial and medical anthropology on children’s bodies with the proliferating child-centred anthropology with children to form a holistic co-production framework connecting children’s experiences, understandings and interpretations of health, biosocial processes of embodiment, and the unequal structural contexts in which children live. This research includes substantial focus on how Western idealised or political constructions of childhood are projected both through Western biomedicine, public health policy and health systems and interventions, to shape and be shaped by with children’s own experiences and agentive activities. I explore these processes across various interconnected health issues, including stress; asthma; resilience; school-based interventions; rheumatic fever; self-harm; mental health; adolescence; Covid-19; poverty; death.

Epistemic recognition in interdisciplinarity. A second main research interest is in the processes of interdisciplinary knowledge production and the mobility of knowledge across disciplinary borders. My current “Borderlands” project, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, uses an epistemic recognition framework to investigate the (bio)social, structural and epistemic processes that activate or silence anthropological knowledge in interdisciplinary spaces.

Drawing and visual methods in research.  My methodological research focus has been on developing innovative ways for examining issues related to child health, including through collaborative drawing and other visual, arts-based and co-constructed approaches. I use ethnographic illustration, graphic narratives and comics to convey the embodied and spatial-relational dimensions of chronic illness, interdisciplinary knowledge production, and research encounters. I am currently developing a graphic ethnography based on my research with New Zealand and Irish children about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Modules taught

‘Global Childhoods.’ Level 2, Children’s Studies. 

‘Comics, Childhood, and the Alternative.’ Level 3 /4, Children’s Studies. 

‘Children and the Digital World.’ Level 3 /4, Children’s Studies. 

‘Communication for Adolescent Health.’ MSc Adolescent Health. 

‘Leadership and Development.’ MSc Adolescent Health.

‘Children and Health.’ Level 1, Children’s Studies.