Sandra Bamford

Sandra Bamford
Associate Professor
Department Chair
Telephone number
(416) 287-7301
Building HL 344

Sandra Bamford received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia.  Her main area of research expertise focuses on the analysis of kinship and family ties.  She has completed research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea with a group of people known as the Kamea.  She has also examined the impact of New Reproductive Technologies in precipitating new forms of kin arrangements.  Her most recent work focuses on child welfare and foster care in North America with an emphasis on how foster care is understood and practiced in Canada.

Teaching Interests

Anthropological Approaches to Kinship and Marriage
Genders and Sexualities
Feminist Anthropology
Embodiment and Anthropology
The Anthropology of ‘Life Itself’
Political Ecology

Research Interests

Kinship; gender; sexuality; embodiment; the anthropology of science; Papua New Guinea; North America; Europe.

Selected Recent Publications

2021 - Under the Guise of Empowerment: Pronatalism, Hope, and the Counter-stories of Women who Discontinued Infertility Treatment in Canada. Co-authored with Andrea Carson, Fiona Webster, and Jessica Polzer. Social Science and Medicine.

2019 - The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Kinship.  (Under contract with Cambridge University Press.

2012 / 2009 - Family Trees among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea: A Non-Genealogical Approach to Imagining Relatedness. In S. Bamford & J. Leach (eds) Beyond Kinship: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. New York: Berghahn Books.

2012 / 2009 - Beyond Kinship: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. (Co-edited with James Leach) Berghahn Books. (Reissued as paperback 2012).

2007 - Bodies in Transition: An Introduction to Emerging Forms of Bodily Praxis in the Pacific. In S. Bamford (ed.) Embodying Modernity and Post-modernity Ritual, Praxis and Social Change in Melanesia. Carolina Academic Press.