Katharine Zywert is a PhD student in the
School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, where she studies medicine in the Anthropocene. Her research investigates health and care practices (some long-standing, others newly emerging) that could offer alternative trajectories for health systems coming to terms with the ecological and social dynamics of a novel geological epoch. She is particularly interested in approaches, techniques, and designs that reduce reliance on state and market mechanisms while building community resilience. Zywert’s research takes a problem-focused, transdisciplinary approach that brings together knowledge from anthropology, sociology, economics, ecology, social psychology, philosophy, medicine, and complexity science. Through ethnography, she is investigating community-level characteristics of niche healthcare arrangements, using a complex systems lens to consider how these models might be scaled up, out, and deep.
Zywert holds a master’s degree in medical anthropology from the University of Oxford (2009) and an undergraduate degree with honours in anthropology from Mount Allison University (2008). She completed a graduate diploma in social innovation at the University of Waterloo (2014) while working as project officer for an initiative designed to cultivate social innovation in the nonprofit sector. Past research interests include embodied experiences of disease and treatment, ecotherapy, and the intersection of personal transformation with socio-ecological systems change. Zywert also writes fiction.
