Mauricio Najarro (he/they) is a Lecturer in Health Inequalities in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Previously, Mauricio worked as a Lecturer in the Departments of History and Data Science at the University of California, Berkeley. They hold a PhD in Medical Anthropology from the UC Berkeley–UCSF Medical Anthropology Joint Program and a PhD in Theological and Religious Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is a member of the Culture, Medicine and Power (CMP) and the Centre for Public Policy Research groups and is interested in developing innovative approaches in teaching and learning how to live well.

Research

• Nonsecular Medical Anthropology
• Science, Technology, and Society
• Sociology
• Queer Studies

For his doctoral research, Mauricio conducted long-term multimodal research with psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers, rehab center owners, members of mutual aid groups in recovery from substance use disorders, and their families during and after lockdown in northern India. Their research engages the ethics and entanglements of vernacular political theologies, telepsychiatry, and mutual aid during “COVID time.”As both a scholar of religion and theology and a medical anthropologist, Mauricio is trained to see the influence of figures and frameworks from religious discursive traditions in ways that illuminate their persistence and relevance in science and medicine. He thus engages perspectives from critical psychiatry and Latin American critical social epidemiology in tandem with South Asian nondual religious epistemologies and practices, expanding horizons for thinking and acting.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSHM007 Foundations in Social Science and Social Theory

PhD supervision

Mauricio is happy to supervise PhD projects related to his geographical and conceptual areas of expertise conducted by passionate researchers committed to rigorous ethnographic method as well as creative and critical approaches to the study of medicine between science and religion.

Further details

See Mauricio's research profile